actual synonyms but which have a different kind of relation to the headword. For example, at milk, the adjective relating to milk is given (lactic); at town, the related adjectives urban, municipal, and the rarer oppidan. Examples of other types of relation include collective nouns (e.g. school at dolphin, or cast at hawk) and words for the male, female, or young of an animal (e.g. leveret at hare, or tom, queen, and kitten at cat), phobias (e.g. arachnophobia at spider), the study of a particular subject (e.g. bryology at moss), or a geometric figure with a given number of sides (e.g. pentagon at five).
Some ‘word links’ are prefixes or suffixes related to the headword, such as photo- at light, cerebro- at brain, and
‘Choose the Right Word’ notes
No two synonyms are exactly the same: they may have subtly different meanings or be used in different contexts. For instance, the words blunt, candid, forthright, frank, and outspoken are all synonyms of each other because they all have roughly the same meaning, but there are subtle differences. There are 120 ‘Choose the Right Word’ notes devoted to explaining the differences in meaning between groups of close synonyms totalling well over 400. The distinctions are based on careful analysis of actual usage as recorded in the Oxford English Corpus (see Linguistic Evidence above). This analysis involved the most
Confusables
There are, in addition, 45 notes explaining the difference between pairs of words such as militate and mitigate, flaunt and flout, or principal and principle, that may cause difficulty because they are written or pronounced similarly but have different meanings.
Word lists
The updated word list feature in OTE comprises over 400 lists designed to supplement the main entries. While the main entry for, say, sport gives synonyms
for 
) to these lists from appropriate words in the main text.
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