A sunset might be described equally well as beautiful or resplendent, but a beautiful baby would not usually be described as resplendent, which implies an especially dazzling appearance. And when we move from nouns to other parts of speech, we almost always find subtle but important differences among synonyms: although the meanings overlap, they differ in emphasis and connotation. But forest and wood, though often interchangeable, have different shades of meaning: a forest tends to be larger and denser than a wood. And if you ask for a soda on the east coast of the United States, you’ll get the same drink that asking for a pop will get you farther west. Just about every popular dictionary defines synonym as a term having “the same or nearly the same” meaning as another, but there is an important difference between “the same” and “nearly the same.” Noun synonyms sometimes mean exactly the same thing.

English, with its long history of absorbing terminology from a wealth of other tongues, is a language particularly rich in synonyms -words so close in meaning that in many contexts they are interchangeable, like the nouns tongue and language in the first part of this sentence.

What synonyms