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A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. For example: hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin, synonym ↔ antonym; Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle.
Oxford Dictionaries Online also includes the New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford Thesaurus of English, Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus and grammar and usage resources. [6] The online version added more than 80,000 words from the OED in August 2015. [7]
The thesaurus was originated in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary 7th edition, where over 200 sets of synonyms were located at specific lexical entries. [5] 1st edition: Includes 2000 entries, 17000 synonyms and antonyms, 4000 definitions, 17 usage labels, 30 special subjects. Headwords derived from Oxford 3000 entries.
4th edition: Includes 207,000 words, phrases, and meanings (including 4000 new words); 155,000 usage examples, 7,000 synonyms and antonyms, over 250 usage topics, 14 pages of coloured illustrations, 3,000 popular keywords, Language Notes. Definitions use only 2000 common words.
overlapping antonyms, a pair of comparatives in which one, but not the other, implies the positive: An example is "better" and "worse". The sentence "x is better than y" does not imply that x is good, but "x is worse than y" implies that x is bad. Other examples are "faster" and "slower" ("fast" is implied but not "slow") and "dirtier" and ...
The site cross-references the contents of dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the Collins English Dictionary; encyclopedias such as the Columbia Encyclopedia, the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, the Hutchinson Encyclopedia (subscription), and Wikipedia; book publishers such as McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins, as well as the Acronym Finder ...
The cause for the start of the project was the arrival of OpenOffice.org in 2002, which was missing the thesaurus of its parent, StarOffice, due to its licensing.. OpenThesaurus filled that gap by importing possible synonyms from a freely available German/English dictionary and refining and updating these in crowdsourced work through the use of a web ap