BIN-01 Skills I: Class Blog, Oral Communication 1

Synonyms: Practice 1

What are synonyms? Synonyms are words that have a similar meaning but are spelt differently. It may happen that these words do not have an exact equivalence, yet they are used to avoid repeating the same lexeme (word), over and over again. In terms of reading, it is not surprising the writers use different synonyms to refer to the same concept and to not repeat the same lexeme all thetime.

For instance a synonym for the word pretty can be the word beautiful. However, many people would say that beautiful is a stronger word than pretty. That is that in terms of beauty, beautiful is higher in intensity than pretty.

Example:

Alice is a beautiful woman. But Claire is also pretty.

Who’s more beautiful? Alice? Or Claire?

The answer, no doubt, because of the choice of words, is Alice.

The following exercise will ask you to work with a group of words and phrases to try to find their corresponding synonyms, or at least very close lexemes in terms of meaning.