Sharp PW-E500 operation manual World English, Opposites

historical: still used today, but only to refer to some practice or article that is no longer part of the modern world, e.g. crinoline as a synonym for petticoat.

humorous: used with the intention of sounding funny or playful, e.g. termino- logical inexactitude as a synonym for lie.

archaic: very old-fashioned language, not in ordinary use at all today, but sometimes used to give a deliberately old-fashioned effect or found in works of the past that are still widely read, e.g. aliment as a synonym for food.

rare:not in common use, e.g. acclivitous as a synonym for steep.

World English

It is an oft-repeated truism that English is now a world language. In this thesaurus, particular care has been taken to include synonyms from every variety of English, not just British, and when these are exclusively or very strongly associated with a region of the world they are labelled as such.

The main regional standards are British (abbreviated to <Brit.>), North American (<N. Amer.>), Australian and New Zealand (<Austral./NZ>), South African (<S. African>), Indian (in the sense of the variety of English found throughout the subcontinent), and West Indian (<W. Indian>). Only if the distinction is very clear is any finer labelling used, as with beer parlour, a Canadian synonym for bar.

Scottish, Irish, and Northern English are varieties within the British Isles containing distinctive vocabulary items of their own. The main synonyms found as regional terms of this kind are listed here and labelled accordingly.

The term for something found mainly or only in a particular country or region (although it may be mentioned in any variety of English) is identified by an indication such as '<<in France>>'. An example is gîte (as a synonym for cottage).

Many regionally restricted terms are informal, rather than being part of the standard language. Writers in the northern hemisphere in search of local colour may be delighted to learn that an Australian synonym for sordid is scungy, while Australian writers may find it equally useful to be given the equivalent terms in Britain, manky and grotty.

Opposites

Many synonym sets are followed by one or more words that have the opposite meaning from the headword, often called 'antonyms'. There are several different kinds of antonym. True and false are absolute antonyms, with no middle ground. Logically, a statement is either true or false, but cannot be slightly true or rather false. Hot and cold, on the other hand, are antonyms with gradations of meaning: it makes perfectly good sense to say that something is rather hot or very cold, and there are a number of words (warm, tepid, cool) which represent intermediate stages. It makes sense to ask about something "How hot is it?" but that commits the speaker to the notion that it is hot at least to some extent. So hot and cold are at opposite ends of a continuum, rather than being absolutes.

For many words, there is no single word that counts as an antonym, but there may be a phrase that gets the opposite meaning across. For example, what is the opposite of senile? There is no exact antonym, but the phrase in the prime of life gets the opposite meaning across. In this title the broadest possible definition has been adopted, giving the maximum amount of information to the user. In some cases, a phrasal antonym is given for a phrasal subentry, e.g. bottle things up as an antonym for let off steam.

The antonyms given in this thesaurus are not the only possible opposites, but they are usually the furthest in meaning from the headword. By looking up the 'opposite' word as an entry in its own right, the user will generally find a much larger range of antonyms to choose from. For example, at the entry for delete the user will find:

-OPPOSITE(S) add, insert.

Both add and insert are entries in their own right.

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