Specifications
46
Related terms
A special feature of
NOTE
is that it gives not only synonyms and opposites but also
other related terms, especially for concrete nouns such as
milk
(where
lactic
is not
a synonym, but a word with a related meaning) and
town
(
municipal
,
urban
, and
oppidan
). There are two types of related words: the first are adjectives which
usually mean 'relating to' the headword but have a different origin (e.g.
lactic
for
milk
) and which may therefore not spring to mind as quickly as a straightforward
derivative such as
milky
. The second type is typically a word very closely associated
with the headword, but with a different meaning. For example, a related word may
denote a part of the thing denoted by the headword, or it may denote a particular
form of this thing. Thus, at
barrel
, the related words given are
cooper
,
stave
, and
hoop
- a maker of barrels, and two important components of a barrel.
Combining forms
Combining forms are given after related terms. These are very similar to the first
kind of related terms, but in the form of a prefix or suffix that is used in combination
with other elements, e.g.
oeno
- with the sense 'wine', as in
oenology
, or
-vorous
with the sense 'eat', as in
carnivorous
.
Awkward synonyms and confusables ( )
One thing a plain list of synonyms cannot do is help the user choose between them
by describing their nuances and connotations. For instance, the words
blunt
,
candid
,
forthright
,
frank
, and
outspoken
are all given as synonyms of each other,
because they all have roughly the same meaning. But there are subtle differences.
This set comprises one of the 120 studies of 'Awkward Synonyms' in the
New
Oxford Thesaurus of English
, devoted to explaining the differences in meaning
between close synonyms. The distinctions are based on careful analysis of actual
usage as recorded in the British National Corpus, and examples of typical usage
are given, selected from the British National Corpus and the citation collection of
the Oxford Reading Programme.
The other type of article displayed as a note ( ), 'Confusables', compares words
which may cause difficulty for the opposite reason to 'awkward synonyms': they are
usually similar in form, as are
militate
and
mitigate
, and sometimes even pronounced
the same, as are
principal
and
principle
, but are very different in meaning.