100 Fun Facts About Synonym

Which word is a synonym of "frugal"?

It comes from the Latin frugalis, meaning virtuous or thrifty, and displaced the Old English spærhende, literally 'spare-handed'.

Which word is a synonym of "candid"?

The Latin root candidus means white; a candidate was originally an office-seeker in a whitened toga.

Which word is a synonym of "feasible"?

It descends from the Old French faisable, from faire, to do, so it literally means 'do-able'.

Which word is a synonym of "tedious"?

It comes from the Latin taedium, weariness, the same root that gives English tedium.

Which word is a synonym of "tranquil"?

The Latin tranquillus is built on the root of quies, rest, the source of quiet.

Which word is a synonym of "obsolete"?

The Latin obsoletus meant worn out or gone out of use, from a verb meaning to wear out or grow old.

Which word is a synonym of "arrogant"?

It comes via Old French from the Latin arrogans, the present participle of arrogo, to claim for oneself.

Which word is a synonym of "mundane"?

The root is the Latin mundus, world, so its older sense was simply 'worldly' as opposed to spiritual.

Which word is a synonym of "jubilant"?

It comes from the Latin iubilans, shouting for joy.

Which word is a synonym of "docile"?

The Latin docilis, from docere, to teach, originally meant simply 'teachable'.

Which word is a synonym of "callous"?

The Latin callosus meant hard-skinned, from callum, hardened skin, which is why a callus on the foot shares the root.

Which word is a synonym of "hostile"?

It shares its Latin root hostis, meaning stranger or enemy, with the word host in the sense of an army.

Which word is a synonym of "abhor"?

First attested in 1449, it comes from the Latin abhorreo, to shrink away from in horror, built on horreo, to bristle with fear.

Which word is a synonym of "audacious"?

The Latin audax, bold, comes from audeo, to dare; the same root gives audacity.

Which word is a synonym of "belligerent"?

The Latin belligerans meant waging war, from bellum, war, and gero, to carry on; a belligerent in a treaty is simply a warring party.

Which word is a synonym of "arduous"?

The Latin arduus meant lofty, steep or hard to reach, and is akin to the Irish ard, high.

Which word is a synonym of "dearth"?

It appears in Tyndale's Pentateuch of 1530 and probably comes from an unrecorded Old English word related to dear, in the sense of costly.

Which word is a synonym of "ephemeral"?

The Greek ephemeros meant lasting only for a day, from epi and hemera, day; the mayfly family is named Ephemeroptera for the same reason.

Which word is a synonym of "hackneyed"?

It comes from the hackney carriage, hired so often that anything overused came to be called hackneyed; the same word gives us 'hack' for a jobbing writer.

Which word is a synonym of "meticulous"?

Oddly, the Latin meticulosus meant fearful or timid, from metus, fear; the sense of careful precision came later.

Which word is a synonym of "nefarious"?

The Latin nefas meant something contrary to divine law, from ne, not, and fas, the dictates of religion.

Which word is a synonym of "zealous"?

It goes back to the Greek zelos, meaning both zeal and jealousy, which makes it a doublet of jealous.

Which word is a synonym of "morose"?

The Latin morosus meant particular or peevish, from mos, custom or self-will, the same root as moral.

Which word is a synonym of "laconic"?

It comes from Laconia, the region ruled by the Spartans, who were famous for their brevity of speech.

Which word is a synonym of "capricious"?

It comes via French and Italian from capriccio, the same word that gives music its capriccio, a free-form piece.

Which word is a synonym of "clandestine"?

The Latin clandestinus meant secret or concealed; French uses the same word, clandestin.

Which word is a synonym of "garrulous"?

The Latin garrulus comes from the verb garrio, to chatter.

Which word is a synonym of "placid"?

The Latin placidus, peaceful, comes from placeo, to please or satisfy, the root of please and placebo.

Which word is a synonym of "obstinate"?

The Latin obstino meant to set one's mind firmly on something; the English word has been recorded since Middle English.

Which word is a synonym of "insipid"?

The Latin insipidus meant tasteless, from in, not, and sapidus, savoury; the sense of 'dull' may have been influenced by insipient, foolish.

Which word is a synonym of "petulant"?

The Latin petulans is akin to peto, to ask for or attack; the word once meant impudent or wanton before settling on 'irritable'.

Which word is a synonym of "lethargic"?

The Greek lethargos, forgetful, contains lethe, forgetting, the name of the river of oblivion in Hades.

Which word is a synonym of "reticent"?

The Latin reticens is the present participle of reticeo, to keep silence.

Which word is a synonym of "taciturn"?

It is a back-formation from taciturnity, from the Latin tacitus, silent, the root of tacit.

Which word is a synonym of "exuberant"?

The Latin exubero, to be abundant, is built from ex, out, and uber, udder, so it originally described a cow or goat overflowing with milk.

Which word is a synonym of "venerate"?

First attested in 1623, it comes from the Latin veneror, to worship, the same root as Venus.

Which word is a synonym of "fastidious"?

The Latin fastidiosus meant disdainful or feeling disgust, from fastidium, loathing or niceness of taste.

Which word is a synonym of "magnanimous"?

From the Latin magnus, great, and animus, soul; it displaced the Old English micelmod, literally 'big-minded'.

Which word is a synonym of "incessant"?

It comes from the Late Latin incessans, from in, not, and cessans, ceasing.

Which word is a synonym of "rescind"?

The Latin rescindo meant to cut back, from re, back, and scindo, to cut, the root of scissors' cousin 'scission'.

Which word is a synonym of "rancor"?

The Latin rancor meant both rancidity and grudge, from ranceo, to be rotten, the source of rancid.

Which word is a synonym of "harbinger"?

A harbinger was originally a person sent ahead to arrange lodgings, from the Old French herbergier, to set up camp or shelter.

Which word is a synonym of "trepidation"?

It was borrowed from the Latin trepidatio, from trepido, to be agitated; intrepid is its fearless cousin.

Which word is a synonym of "umbrage"?

It comes from the Latin umbraticus, in the shade, from umbra, shadow, which is why to take umbrage is to feel overshadowed.

Which word is a synonym of "vindicate"?

The Latin vindico meant to lay legal claim to, set free or avenge, from vis, force, and dico, to say.

Which word is a synonym of "impecunious"?

The Latin pecunia, money, originally referred to wealth in cattle, from pecus, herd.

Which word is a synonym of "myriad"?

The Greek murias meant a number of ten thousand, from murios, countless.

Which word is a synonym of "gregarious"?

First attested in 1688, it comes from the Latin gregarius, belonging to a flock, from grex, herd; congregate shares the root.

Which word is a synonym of "ubiquitous"?

It comes from the Medieval Latin ubiquitas, from ubique, everywhere, from ubi, where, plus the suffix que, ever.

Which word is a synonym of "zenith"?

It comes via Medieval Latin from the Arabic samt ar-ra's, 'direction of the head', with the -ni- thought to be a medieval copying error for -m-.

In which year was Roget's Thesaurus first published?

Peter Mark Roget, a physician and former secretary of the Royal Society, had begun compiling it for his own use in 1805.

The word 'thesaurus' comes from an Ancient Greek word meaning what?

Until the 19th century a thesaurus was any dictionary or encyclopedia, such as the 1532 Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.

The Greek elements of the word 'synonym' translate literally as what?

Syn means together or alike and onoma means name; the standard test for synonymy is whether one word can replace the other without changing the sentence's meaning.

Which of these is the standard test for whether two words are synonyms?

If one form swaps for the other without changing the meaning, they pass; begin, start, commence and initiate all do.

The English word 'foreword' was coined as a purist replacement for which Romance-derived word?

Turkish did something similar, inventing okul to replace the Arabic-derived mektep and medrese.

Pairs like people/folk and liberty/freedom pair Old English words with words from which language?

Archer and bowman are another such pair, one from the conquerors' tongue and one native.

What is a 'poecilonym'?

It is a curiosity because it is autological, being itself a synonym of synonym, and is missing from most major dictionaries.

Peter Mark Roget began the word catalogue that became his thesaurus in which year, for personal use?

He described it as a small-scale 'classed catalogue of words' in the foreword to the 1852 first edition, nearly fifty years later.

Roget's Thesaurus is organised into how many primary classes?

The classes branch into over a thousand 'meaning clusters', a schema based on Leibniz and ultimately on Aristotle's Categories.

The Amarakosha, a thesaurus written in verse in the 4th century, is in which language?

The first text that could be called a thesaurus is credited to Philo of Byblos in classical antiquity.

Which word is a synonym of "verbose"?

Verbose comes from the Latin verbum, meaning 'word'.

Which word is a synonym of "mendacious"?

It derives from the Latin mendax, 'lying', and is unrelated to 'mend'.

The first edition of Roget's Thesaurus contained roughly how many words?

The eighth edition runs to about 443,000 words, yet it keeps Roget's original classification scheme.

Which word is a synonym of "deleterious"?

The word traces to the Greek deleterios, 'noxious', and is common in medical and genetic writing.

Which word is a synonym of "enervate"?

Despite sounding like 'energize', it means the opposite; the Latin root nervus gives its literal sense of removing the nerves.

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae's 1985 CD-ROM was the first compact disc not to contain what?

The TLG began at UC Irvine in 1972 as a project to digitise every surviving Greek text, and moved online in 2001.

Which word is a synonym of "furtive"?

It comes from the Latin fur, meaning 'thief'.

Which word is a synonym of "indolent"?

In medicine an indolent ulcer or tumour is one that causes little pain or grows slowly, from the Latin dolere, 'to suffer pain'.

Which word is a synonym of "nonchalant"?

It comes from the Old French nonchaloir, 'to be unconcerned', ultimately from the Latin calere, 'to be warm'.

Which word is a synonym of "opulent"?

The Latin root ops means 'wealth' or 'resources'.

The lexical database WordNet was created in 1985 at which university?

Psychologist George A. Miller led the project; he and Christiane Fellbaum won the 2006 Antonio Zampolli Prize for it.

Which word is a synonym of "erudite"?

The Latin eruditus literally means 'freed from roughness', from rudis, the root of 'rude'.

Which word is a synonym of "gullible"?

It comes from the verb 'gull', meaning to dupe; the old joke that it is missing from the dictionary is itself a test of gullibility.

WordNet groups synonyms into sets known by what name?

Each one comes with a short gloss and usage examples; the English database holds more than 175,000 of them.

Which word is a synonym of "malleable"?

From the Latin malleus, 'hammer', the word first described metals that could be beaten into thin sheets.

Which word is a synonym of "ameliorate"?

The Latin melior, 'better', is the same root found in the French word meilleur.

Which word is a synonym of "cacophony"?

Greek kakos, 'bad', plus phone, 'sound'; its opposite is euphony.

Which word is a synonym of "querulous"?

It comes from the Latin queri, 'to complain', the same root that gives English the word quarrel.

In WordNet's terminology, 'canine' is what kind of term for 'dog'?

The relation runs the other way too: dog is a hyponym of canine. Every WordNet noun hierarchy leads up to a single root, 'entity'.

Which word is a synonym of "tenacious"?

From the Latin tenere, 'to hold', the word also describes physically sticky or adhesive substances.

Which word is a synonym of "wistful"?

The word probably grew out of the older adverb wistly, 'intently', with its sense shaped by 'wishful'.

Which term did the Fowler brothers coin in 1906 for using synonyms just to avoid repetition?

Henry Fowler's 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage warned there are few literary faults so prevalent.

Which word is a synonym of "copious"?

The Latin copia, 'plenty', is the same root found in cornucopia, the horn of plenty.

Which word is a synonym of "irate"?

It comes from the Latin ira, 'anger', which also gives English irascible and ire.

Which word is a synonym of "alacrity"?

The Latin alacer, 'lively', is also the ancestor of the Italian musical direction allegro.

Which word is a synonym of "facetious"?

Facetious is one of the few English words containing all five vowels once each, in alphabetical order.

Guardian sub-editors call gratuitous synonyms 'povs', an acronym for what phrase?

The phrase was cut from a draft article about carrots in the Liverpool Echo.

Which word is a synonym of "lugubrious"?

It comes from the Latin lugere, 'to mourn', and usually implies grief that is exaggerated or theatrical.

Which word is a synonym of "pallid"?

The Latin pallidus also gives English pallor; the shared root is behind the name of the pale-leaved pallid bat.

The Historical Thesaurus of English, begun in 1965, is compiled at which university?

The print version, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in 2009 after 44 years of work.

Which word is a synonym of "sagacious"?

The Latin sagax originally meant 'keen-scented' and was used of hunting dogs with a sharp nose.

Which word is a synonym of "brusque"?

It reached English via French from the Italian brusco, 'sour' or 'tart', a sense dictionaries still record.

Which word is a synonym of "sycophant"?

The Greek sykophantes literally means 'fig-shower', and in ancient Athens it meant an informer rather than a flatterer.

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, a vast Latin dictionary begun in 1894, is compiled in which city?

Its offices hold about 10 million paper slips, including roughly 90,000 for the word 'et' alone.

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae is now expected to be finished around which year?

Founded by Eduard Wolfflin, the project was originally expected to take about 20 years; the first fascicle appeared in 1900.

Peter Mark Roget became the first secretary of which Manchester institution?

Roget had moved to Manchester to succeed Thomas Percival at the Manchester Infirmary, where he lectured on physiology.

In Turkish, native 'kara' and Persian-borrowed 'siyah' are synonyms for which colour?

Ottoman Turkish went further: water could be su (Turkish), ab (Persian) or ma (Arabic).

Which 18th-century French philosopher wrote, but never published, a dictionary of synonyms?

His countryman Gabriel Girard did publish one in 1718, La Justesse de la langue francoise.

In journalism, 'the elongated yellow fruit' is a notorious second-mention synonym for what?

The Turkey City Lexicon for science-fiction writers calls the same habit 'Burly Detective' syndrome.

Roget said his thesaurus was inspired by the Utilitarian teachings of which philosopher?

Roget, a former secretary of the Royal Society, wanted to help writers 'painfully groping their way' through composition.