Customer Reviews

English Synonyms and Antonyms (dictionary-thesaurus)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This more function-specific reference is potentially more helpful to me for some terms than Merriam-Webster-s Dictionary and Thesaurus, unless I am in a big hurry and looking for an extremely terse listings by parts of speech. However the degree of coverage across terms varies widely and at times lacks any antonyms -- even when these are not necesarily hard to derive. Overall, its a good start but needs more attention to detail and more comprehensive coverage of the English language.

It has substantial cross-referencing to other entries for words listed under "similar" and "dissimilar". Many of these are helpful and make sense. For many entries there is an additional paragraph which helps explain subtle nuances/shading between synonyms. These reasonably are interesting to read and sometimes include famous quotes or poetic verses.

Curiously there is no clear distinction between parts of speech and some entries are still very limited.

For example: the word "MOCK" has no direct entry but offers a click to take one to the cross-referenced word "SNEER". SNEER is then treated mostly though not totally as a noun. Shifts back and forth between noun and verb forms of the synonyms are subtle and not always clearly identified. They do indicate that certain synonyms for SNEER such as SCOFF could be done in act or word. There was a fairly generous list of synonyms. No antonyms. A native English reader by experience can quickly accommodate to the fact that the majority of examples had to do with its use as a noun and would be able to adapt these to verb or adjective forms when needed. But this process could be hard to sort out for anyone learning English, or using it regularly as a secondary language. Unfortunately, it seems these are the persons who might be most attracted to a resource such as this.

Finally, it still seems substantially incomplete unless combined with the default dictionary in Kindle (The New Oxford American Dictionary) which explains the use of the word "MOCK" as a noun, verb, and adjective. Kindle's built-in dictionary actually incuded mock as a modifier. For example: a) as a simulation or practice experience (MOCK debate), b) or as inauthentic (MOCK horror). These were not included at all in Fernald's book.

What an excellent find. My high school age kids need something like this for English and it allows them to easily increase their vocabulary and word usage as they use it.

Much better than any other Thesaurus I found using amazon as the search engine because it is set up like a dictionary and is accessed that way. Other books require you to shuffle through the pages to find the words.
Love it!!