Synonymies

Synonymies, the plural term for synonymy, refer to the semantic relationships between words or expressions that share similar meanings, and to the scholarly study of these relations. The concept is central to lexical semantics, lexicography, and natural language processing, and encompasses a range of phenomena beyond exact equivalence.

In practice, synonymies are context-dependent and gradable. Two words may be interchangeable in some contexts but not in others due to differences in connotation, formality, collocation, or domain usage. Register and stylistic nuances often determine whether a word is an appropriate synonym in a given sentence.

Types and gradience: absolute, or perfect, synonyms are rare. Most so-called synonyms are near-synonyms that differ in nuance, frequency, or applicability across contexts. Multiword expressions can function as synonyms for single words, and synonyms can extend across parts of speech or semantic domains, though with caution about idiomatic meaning.

Applications and methods: dictionaries and thesauri encode synonymy to guide paraphrase and vocabulary expansion. In natural language processing, synonymy informs tasks such as paraphrase generation, query expansion, and information retrieval. Computational approaches often approximate synonymy using distributional similarity or structured lexical databases, while noting that true synonymy is inherently context-sensitive.

Evolution and variation: synonymies shift over time as meanings diverge or converge, and as borrowings and neologisms enter a language. Regional varieties and specialized domains (science, law, technology) maintain distinct synonym sets, reflecting usage patterns and cultural preferences.

Example: begin and start are near-synonyms in many contexts, but begin is generally more formal or literary, and certain phrases prefer one term over the other (begin a journey versus start a journey).