A Word, Please: Synonyms make English interesting. So do these other terms

The word “synonym” shows up in print about 18 times more often than the word “homonym,” according to Google’s Ngram Viewer. It’s nearly 13 times more popular than “antonym,” even though “antonym” showed a strange and unexplained surge from 2006 to 2009. And it’s 22 times more popular than “homophone” and 66 times more popular than “homograph.”

Is “synonym” the leader simply because it’s more useful? Or is it possible that people use “antonym,” “homonym,” “homophone” and “homograph” less because they don’t know how? Either way, the less people use these words, the less others hear them and the less familiar they are.

In fact, “antonym,” “homonym,” “homophone” and “homograph” can be useful, especially if you don’t want to make the mistake of using “synonym” incorrectly when you mean something different. Let’s look at all these terms, starting with synonym.

As you know, synonyms are words that have the same or close-to-same meaning. Fall and autumn. Horrible and terrible. Perfect and ideal. Petite and short. Last and final. Pants and slacks. Fix and repair. The list seems endless and includes pairs representing almost every part of speech — nouns, verbs and adjectives especially.

“Perhaps no other language has as many synonyms as English,” write the editors of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Why? Probably because English has adopted words from so many other languages. For example, “happy” comes from Old English. But “jolly” came to us from the Old French “jolif.” The result: a rich language that offers endless ways to make writing more interesting.

“Synonyms give color, precision and variety to a person’s writing, breaking up the dullness that can come from too many overused words.”

Antonyms are opposites, sort of. An antonym of “good” is “bad.” An antonym of “sleep” is “consciousness.” An antonym of “fast” is “slow.” A lot of words don’t have antonyms, like “cat,” according to Merriam-Webster’s online thesaurus. While others have what Merriam’s calls “near antonyms,” like for the verb “house” in the meaning of providing shelter, it offers “evict” as a near antonym, even though “evict” means to stop housing more than it means to not house in the first place.

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Homonyms, in the simplest definition, are identical-seeming words that refer to different things. A bank where you put your money and the bank of a river are homonyms. A waterfowl at your local park is a duck, which is a synonym of the verb “duck.” This term is easy to remember once you note that “homo” means “same” and “nym” means “name.” But homonyms are actually a little more complicated because, depending on whom you ask, homographs and homophones can be considered sub-types of homonyms.

Homographs are words that are visually the same, even though their meanings or pronunciations aren’t the same. “He dove into the lake while a white dove flew overhead” illustrates how the homographs “dove” and “dove” work. Another example: “does” the verb and “does” the plural of “doe,” a deer (a female deer). An easy way to remember this is to think of the second part of the word “homograph” as a reference to graphics — visuals.

Homophones, as the “phones” part suggests, sound alike. But they may not look alike or mean the same thing. “We ate a pizza that had eight slices” uses the homophones “ate” and “eight.”

To recap, homonyms have the same name. Homophones have the same sound. And homographs have the same appearance. But you can use “homonym” as a broader catch-all if you like.

“Homonyms may be words with identical pronunciations but different spellings and meanings, such as to, too and two,” Merriam’s advises. “Or they may be words with both identical pronunciations and identical spellings but different meanings, such as quail (the bird) and quail (to cringe). Finally, they may be words that are spelled alike but are different in pronunciation and meaning, such as the bow of a ship and a bow that shoots arrows.”

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].