Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Thesaurus. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Thesaurus Quotes And Sayings by 96 Authors including Matthew Mcconaughey,W. Somerset Maugham,William Shakespeare,Erin Mckean,Jeanette Winterson for you to enjoy and share.
I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
Hear the meaning within the word.
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today ... because there's no space for all of them.
The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.
You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.
Knavery?" Art3mis said after she'd finished reading it. "Were you using a thesaurus when you wrote this?
A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.
If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.
The Anglo-Saxons had a great word for the right word, the word that you need right now, when another one simply would not do. That word is wordriht.
Get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there. p. 591
You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information.
Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.
In this case, consulting the dictionary would simply mean discovering what one already knew, Dictionaries only provide information that is likely to be useful to everyone
Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.
The dictionary is a closed system in which someone interested in the meaning of a word can go around and around and end up exactly where he started, simply because words are defined in terms of other words, and these, in turn, are defined in terms of still other words.
A word is not simply a word.
The vocabulary I use has to reflect the people I'm trying to communicate with.
Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability.
Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.
It's in the dictionary. And when I find what it is, I'll write it down in case it comes up again, I'll be certain to avoid it.
Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.
The last motive in the world for acquiring vocabulary should be to impress. Words should be acquired because we urgently need them - to convey, to reach, to express something within us, and to understand others.
I contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of 'What People Used to Call Things.'
To be honest, I almost never use the dictionary. I just don't like dictionaries. I don't like the way they look, and I don't like what they say inside.
I refuse to be linguistically constrained by dictionary writers.
Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful. If you hesitate, and cogitate, you will come up with another word...but it probably won't be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.
There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom.
Careful writers and discerning readers delight in the profusion of words in the English lexicon, no two of which are exact synonyms. Many words convey subtle shades of meaning,
The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.
I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.
There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.
Encyclopedia is a Latin term. It means "to paraphrase a term paper."
My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary.
Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.
Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
County library? Reference desk, please. Hello? Yes, I need a word definition. Well, that's the problem. I don't know how to spell it and I'm not allowed to say it. Could you just rattle off all the swear words you know and I'll stop you when ... Hello?
How many times do I need to repeat the word for it to join your vocabulary?
There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.
Therapists. Always asking the same questions over and over in slightly different ways. They are, like, the Ultimate Thesauruses.
Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.
A word is a magic thing. It holds the essence of an object or idea and pins it to the world. A word can set a universe in motion.
There is no better moment in life than finding the right word.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
No writer in the world agonizes over words the way a scientist does. Terminology is everything:
God, I love a man with a big vocabulary.
Antanaclasic, which means that it keeps using the same word in different senses.
Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
Vocabulary spills I'm ill.
I used to like the word of the day and when I read, highlight words that I didn't know and look them up.
Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.
Five of the most exciting words in the English language: "What shall I read next?
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
I just read them for fun."
"Dictionaries?"
"Yes."
"That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful."
"Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary."
He blinked.
"See?" She said. "Fun.
Use of the word; the word itself was not printed.
If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.
To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.
The use of the right word, the exact word, is the difference between a pencil with a sharp point and a thick crayon.
What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
There are so many words in our language; we get to know so few of them.
Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas and not the ideas themselves.
The English language is so elastic that you can find another word to say the same thing.
There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.
I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.
It's your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.
I'm apt to get drunk on words ... Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.
The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.
I'm sure I'll have more to say about the penis word.
Dictionary of Misunderstood Words
I will not impress you with words, I will prove to you their definition. It's a genuine vocabulary.
A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.
The word within a word, unable to speak a word
If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary.
We think people go to a dictionary to find out what a word means. Most people go to the dictionary because they don't want to look stupid.
Words are objects of a color and a size and a form and a shape.
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.
If a word in the dictionary were mispelled, how would we know?
Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.
Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.
one of the worst things about electronic communication. Lacking facial expression, tone of voice, or context, words could be taken any number of ways. With only one cryptic word now, I was discouraged.
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I'll stop the whole production: 'Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.'
I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.
The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
We all had to search for more words to describe things.
Bend words. Stretch them, squash them, mash them up, fold them. Turn them over or swing them upside down. Make up new words. Leave a place for the strange and downright impossible ones. Use ancient words. Hold on to the gangly, silly, slippy, truthful, dangerous, out-of-fashion ones.
Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life ...
The gadget had come with The New Oxford American Dictionary preloaded. You only had to begin typing your word and the Kindle found it for you. It was, he thought, TiVo for bookworms.
Use the smallest word that does the job.
I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.
'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'
I got niggaz lookin' for Websters like George Papadopolis'