Synonyms

What are synonyms?

Synonyms are words that have the same or almost the same meaning.

Why should we use synonyms?

When speaking or writing, using the same words over and over can be boring for whoever is listening to you or reading your work. Read the paragraph below.

This morning I saw a beautiful lady walking down the street. She had beautiful long hair and a beautiful smile. Her skin was beautiful. She wore a beautiful red dress.

The paragraph above is not very interesting because the word beautiful is used over and over. We can use words that have the same meaning as beautiful to make the paragraph much more interesting. We can rewrite the paragraph like this:

This morning I saw a beautiful lady walking down the street. She had lovely long hair and a dazzling smile. Her skin was radiant. She wore a pretty red dress.

This paragraph is much more interesting because we didn’t use the word beautiful over and over. We used synonyms for beautiful, such as lovely and pretty.

How can we find synonyms?

If you need to find synonyms for a word, one way to do this is to use a thesaurus. A thesaurus is a book which has words arranged in alphabetical order. For each word, synonyms are given. We can also find thesauruses on the internet. All we have to do is type a word in the search bar and click search to get a list of synonyms. Click here to use an online thesaurus. The thesaurus will open in a new tab.

Give it a try!

Now that you have opened your online thesaurus, use it to find synonyms for the following words:

• small
• afraid
• happy
• angry
• tired