USING A THESAURUS

Notice that a thesaurus entry provides four pieces of information for a word.

1. Part of speech 2. Brief definition 3. List of synonyms 4. Example of word used in sentence

thesaurus

A book that lists synonyms and often includes related words and antonyms.

ANTONYMS

In some dictionaries and thesauri, you will find the abbreviation Ant., which stands for the word antonym. An antonym is a word that means the opposite of another word. For instance, the opposite of clever is stupid. Like synonyms, antonyms have different shades of meaning. Few words are exactly opposite each other. Although black and white represent opposite shades of color, there are some ways in which they are not exact opposites. Some antonyms are considered opposites; but they are, in fact, not opposed to each other. Husband and wife, brother and sister, and question and answer are word pairs of this type. The words right and wrong, on the other hand, are true opposites. The book of Proverbs contains many sets of antonyms, such as wise and foolish or wickedness and righteousness.

HOMONYMS

We have studied two different kinds of words: synonyms and antonyms. Now we will discuss a third kind of "-nyms," homonyms. Homonyms are words which are pronounced the same but have different meanings and often different spelling.