Sharp PW-E310 Illustrative examples, Linguistic evidence, Phrasal verbs and idiomatic phrases

Illustrative examples

Almost every synonym set in NOTE is illustrated with a carefully chosen example of the word in use in the relevant sense. These are authentic examples of natural usage taken from the British National Corpus and the files of the Oxford Reading Programme (see Linguistic evidence below). They have occasionally been lightly edited to make the sense more apparent or to eliminate digressions. The examples can therefore be trusted for guidance on using unfamiliar words in an idiomatic way.

Where part of an example is displayed in bold type, this indicates that some or all of the synonyms can be substituted for that particular phrase, not just for the headword alone. Thus at attached, the example given is:

she was very attached to her brother.

In this case the synonyms are all equivalent to attached to:

FOND OF, devoted to, full of regard for, full of admiration for; affectionate towards, tender towards, caring towards; <informal> mad about, crazy about, nuts about.

In the entry for impute, the example given is:

he imputes selfish views to me.

This is followed by the synonym set:

ATTRIBUTE, ascribe, assign, credit, accredit, chalk up; connect with, associate with, lay on, lay at the door of; <informal> pin on, stick on.

The synonyms up to the first semicolon are synonyms for impute, and those after it are synonyms for impute to.

Linguistic evidence

The compilers of NOTE have had access to two major linguistic resources, the British National Corpus and the files of the Oxford Reading Programme. The British National Corpus is a body of 100 million words of English books, newspapers, and transcribed speech in machine-readable form, used for linguistic and lexicographi- cal research. The Oxford Reading Programme is a database of citations collected by Oxford's international network of readers, currently amounting to over 77 million words and increasing by about 7 million words every year.

In both these resources, the context of every occurrence of a given word can be viewed in a few seconds, making it possible to see more clearly than ever before how words are actually used. This method was used not only to confirm whether a word has senses for which there are suitable synonyms and to check the sense of words being selected as synonyms but also to actively find synonyms which have not previously been recorded. The British National Corpus, in particular, was also used to obtain the sentences and phrases given as examples of usage.

Phrasal verbs and idiomatic phrases

English is full of idiomatic expressions-phrases whose meaning is more than the sum of their parts. For example, a shot in the dark means 'a guess', while a shot in the arm means 'a boost'. Neither of these meanings has very much to do with more literal meanings of shot. In this thesaurus, particular care has been given to make a full selection of idiomatic expressions and to give synonyms for them. If a word is used as both a noun and a verb, the idiomatic expressions are listed as subentries under the part of speech in which the word is used. Thus by the book is given under the noun senses of book, while book in is given under the verb senses.

Full coverage is also given to phrasal verbs in this thesaurus. Phrasal verbs are expressions such as book in and turn out, consisting of a verb plus a particle. The meaning of a phrasal verb is often very different from that of the basic verb; for example, the meanings of take off are quite distinct from the meanings of take. Phrasal verbs are listed as idiomatic expressions under the main verb entry.

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