Synonym

A synonym is a word with the same meaning as another word.Definition of synonym from Oxford Dictionaries Online. OxfordDictionaries.com, 2011. web: OD-syn .Synonym - Definition and more from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 2011. webpage:
MW-syn.

Examples

 sick and ill
 child and kid
 baby and infant
 rich and wealthy
 make and create
 student and pupil
 car and automobile
 scared and frightened

Nature

Synonyms can be nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives, but both words must be of the same part of speech. That means, only a noun can be a synonym of another noun, only a verb can be a synonym of another verb, and so on. One can find sets of synonyms in a thesaurus, which is a book listing groups of related words. 

Some words are near-synonyms, which have similar but not exactly the same meaning. Examples of proper nouns, such as names of these languages, having synonyms or near-synonyms include:

 Siamese also known as ThaiHudak, Thomas John. "Thai." The world's major languages. Routledge, 2018. 679-695.
 Ute also known as NoochewLeap, William L. American Indian English. University of Utah Press, 2012.
 Urdu also known as LashkariRana, Toqir A., et al. "An Unsupervised Approach for Sentiment Analysis on Social Media Short Text Classification in Roman Urdu." Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing 21.2 (2021): 1-16.
 Ghurkhali also known as NepaliGhosh, Sujit. "Khas-kura Nepali and Cultural Consolidation in Darjeeling Hills: A Genesis." (2015).
 Euskara also known as BasqueLaka Mugarza, Itziar. A brief grammar of Euskara, the Basque language. Universidad del País Vasco, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Euskarazko Errektoreordetza, 1996.
 Myanmar also known as BurmeseROSS, ANDREW J. "Supplement to the Burmese (Myanmar) amber checklist and bibliography, 2020." Palaeoentomology 4.1 (2021): 057-076.
 Persian also known as Farsi or ParsiFarhady, Hossein, and Kobra Tavassoli. "Assessing Farsi." The companion to language assessment 4 (2013): 1790-1798.

History

The word synonym dates back over 500 years, to late Middle English. The word is derived from Latin from the Greek word sunōnumon, neuter form of the adjective sunōnumos, from sun- meaning 'with' + onoma meaning 'name' in the Greek language. The meaning of the word has remained unchanged for all these centuries. There is even a saying, dating to 1892, Once a synonym, always a synonym.   Science, John Michels, American Association for the
   Advancement of Science, 1892, page 220, web:
   BG-AJ.
The word has been taught to generations of English-language students and is commonly known by the public. Many other languages have a similar word for synonym with the same or similar spelling.

Related pages

 Antonym
 Homonym
 Homophone

References

Category:Vocabulary
Category:Linguistics