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I’ve been accumulating synonyms, from a particular source, for the words in my vocabulary to see if I can do various processing on the synonym lists to determine “similarity” between words, a metric I’ll then use in various ways in composing quizzes. One benefit of doing the tedious process of data entry myself is I begin to notice patterns, especially characteristics of this particular source of synonyms. Do these patterns then suggest some flaws in that source?
According to my synonym source these words have exactly the same synonyms which would imply they are very similar, if not identical – but is this true? And these words: metonymy, onomatopoeia, malapropism, alliteration, adumbration have almost exactly the same synonyms as the first six. Eleven almost identical words – seems crazy, so let’s see how close their definitions are:
anaphora
n.
1. [grammar] the use of a word referring to or replacing a word used earlier in a sentence, to avoid repetition
2. [rhethoric] the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses
antistrophe
n.
the second section of an ancient Greek choral ode or of one of division of it
aposiopesis
n.
[rhetoric] the device of suddenly breaking off in speech
ellipsis
n.
the omission from speech or writing or a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues
oxymoron
n.
a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunctiona phrase made by combining two words that are contradictory or incongruous
a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous seemingly self-contradictory effect
tropology
n.
the figurative use of language
<special usage> (Christian theology} the figurative interpretation of the scriptures as a source of moral guidance
So of these ellipsis and anaphora do seem quite close, but the rest are not that connected. aposiopesis has some connection with the the ellipsis and anaphora, but antistrophe and tropology seem quite unrelated and also very specialized meanings. And of course oxymoron, a widely used word seems to have essentially no connection (other than being descriptive of speech patterns).
Let’s look at the other five:
metonymy
n.
the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing
[rhetoric] a figure of speech that consists of the use of the name of one object or concept for that of another to which it is related, or of which it is a part, as “scepter” for “sovereignty” or “the bottle” or “strong drink” or “count heads (or noses)” for “count people”
onomatopoeia
n.
the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named
<special usage> the use of such words for rhetorical effectwords that sound like, or suggest, their meaning
1. the formation of a word, as cuckoo, meow, honk, or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent
2. a word so formed
3. the use of imitative and naturally suggestive words for rhetorical, dramatic, or poetic effect
malapropism
n.
the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with unintentionally amusing effectdeliberate misuse of a word or mangling of the English language, often done for comic effect
1. the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one of similar sound, esp. when creating a ridiculous effect
2. the habit of misusing words in this manner
alliteration
n.
the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words
1. the commencement of two or more stressed syllables of a word group either with the same consonant sound or sound group, or with a vowel sound that may different syllable to syllable
2. the commencement of two or more words of a word group with the same letter
the repetition of similar sounds, especially at the beginnings of words, in written speech or the spoken word
adumbration
v.
report or represent in outline
<special usage> indicate faintly; foreshadow or symbolize; overshadow1. to produce a faint image or resemblance of; to outline or sketch
2. to foreshadow; prefigure
3. to darken or conceal partially; overshadow
So adumbration really has no connection, almost at all with any of the other ten, so synonyms as similarity really fail there. metonymy seems to have some connection, but onomatopoeia and malapropism (which are vaguely related to each other) and alliteration have very little connection to any of the first six.
Now at least ten of the words have something to do with patterns of speech (but so do lots of other words) so I think this synonym source is doing a disservice to treat these as similar as they do (doing a little reverse engineering I think this apparent similarity is an attribute to their data structures and methods of retrieving “synonyms” by actually grabbing all the synonyms of a particular sense/meaning of the word, i.e. really in terms of the experiment I’m doing with synonym trees, the source is doing something similar, i.e. including all the next degree of separation.
Now while this pattern is particularly strong for these eleven words it is also a device they use in other words, even though those might only be a fraction of the total list of synonyms. In short, they’re generating too much overlap.
Now in terms of my practical requirements detecting this similarity would be a good reason to include some of these terms in a quiz for one of the others, not to exclude them because they might have the same definitions. So I think I can use synonyms (possibly both list vector comparison and trees) as measures of similarity, but then I’m actually back to the original possible issue and that is comparing definitions themselves for similarity (not literally, but approximately, as with search). At least the synonyms might provide a smaller set of definitions to have to examine and that’s good as the comparison is slow, per definition, and the comparison for the entire vocabulary is N^2 so I can’t just do brute force, especially during real-time generation of the quiz.
As to the value of any of these words as Word Of The Day, most of them seem sufficiently obscure to be something any of us would rarely use, although obviously alliteration, malapropism and oxymoron seem more useful. adumbration, onomatopoeia and ellipsis seem like the kind of words you might encounter in some advanced test, so there these six are probably worth learning.