Thesaurus (Synonyms & Antonyms)

About the Thesaurus (Synonyms & Antonyms)

Look up a word or phrase and see each of its meanings separately — with a definition, example sentences, synonyms, opposites, and broader and narrower words — so you pick a synonym that fits your sentence. “Big” as in size gives large, huge, enormous, massive (opposites small, little); “big” meaning significant gives important (opposite unimportant).

The data is Princeton WordNet 3.1, a lexical database built by linguists at Princeton University: about 94,000 meanings of 93,000 English words and phrases (names of people and places are left out). Inflected forms are found too — ran opens run, geese opens goose. Your searches stay in your browser.

Common uses

• Finding a better word while writing an essay, report, story, cover letter or post.
• Avoiding repetition — and checking that a synonym really means the same in your context.
• Learning English vocabulary: definitions, examples and opposites in one place.
• Finding more general or more specific terms (broader and narrower words) for tagging and classification.

Synonyms, similar, related, broader and narrower

• Synonyms are words WordNet lists for exactly the same meaning (“car, auto, automobile”).
• Similar words are close in meaning but not identical; for adjectives this is how WordNet groups most near-synonyms (“big” → “huge”, “enormous”). The most common words are listed first.
• Opposites come from WordNet’s antonym links, including the opposite of the main adjective an adjective is similar to (“huge” → “small”).
• Broader words are more general (a car is a kind of motor vehicle); narrower words are more specific kinds (bus, sports car).
• Related words are WordNet’s “see also” links between adjectives and verbs (“happy” → “cheerful”, “glad”).

Labels such as informal, slang, British, law or medicine come from WordNet’s usage, region and subject domains.

About the data

Princeton University, “About WordNet”, WordNet, Princeton University, 2010; version 3.1 (2011) is used here. See also: Miller, G. A. (1995). WordNet: A Lexical Database for English. Communications of the ACM, 38(11), 39–41.

WordNet 3.1 is © 2011 Princeton University and is used under the WordNet licence, which is distributed with the data. Headwords are those in the SCOWL English word lists (Kevin Atkinson) plus WordNet’s phrases and capitalised words such as days, months and languages; names of people, places and the Latin names of plants and animals are not included.

Limitations

• WordNet 3.1 dates from 2011, so very new words and senses (for example recent slang) are missing.
• It is not a full dictionary: there is no pronunciation, etymology, or usage frequency, and grammatical words such as “the” or “of” are not included.
• Synonyms share a meaning but are not always interchangeable — check register and collocation (you can say “a big mistake” but not “a large mistake” in the same sense).
• Spellings are mostly American; British spellings are often, but not always, listed as variants.
• Words you have not looked up before need a connection: the data is split into small parts that are downloaded when needed.
• Spelling suggestions come from words that begin the same way, so a wrong first letter (“fonetic” for “phonetic”) finds nothing useful.

Privacy

Your searches never leave your browser. The thesaurus data is split into about 150 small files on this site, and your browser downloads only the parts it needs (about 36 KB each); parts you have used before keep working offline.