46Illustrative 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.