TAYLOR'S SYNONYMS.

"The greatest beauty of writing is precision of expression. It is essentially connected with correctness of thinking; for who can transfer his thoughts with entire exactness of contour and significancy of accessory ideas, who does not form them definitely, and who cannot find up among the whole mass of kindred terms the only word which represents the very shade and shape of the idea in his mind?"-Eberhard.

"The study of synonymy is adapted to teach more than precision of style. By a necessary consequence it bestows accuracy of thinking; it exercises the comparison while it sharpens the critical skill; and it tends to diminish and to settle those verbal disputes which, in theology, morality, science, and indeed in all the branches of philosophy, have so often divided men into parties for want of their understanding each other."-Preface.

"The object of synonymy is to collect sets of media, or of words, which have such a general resemblance as frequently to be interchanged and misapplied; then to assort them, and stamp each respectively with the mark of its intellectual correlative. Were this generally effected, and the use of it generally adopted, it is not possible to convey any idea of the consequent rapidity and forcible impression in mental communication, and of the reflex influence of these on the precision and energy of thought itself, that would follow.

"It is the progress to indistinctness, through the multiplicity of relations in which words are used, that debars later authors from that pith and raciness of style peculiar to the early writers; when the currency of language, yet fresh from the mint, presents the image as distinct as the superscription is legible.

"The original copiousness of our Saxon with importations from the continent, enriched from the treasures of Greece and Rome, became fully competent to express all that antiquity had conceived, or improvements, refinements, and abstractions of modern times could suggest.

"The office of the synonymist is not to expose the gross errors of the ignorant, but to fix the vagueness of classic composition. For this office Mr. Taylor is well qualified, by a nicely discriminating perception of the shades of meaning superinduced by custom, even when the ground of etymology is the same, and by a competent knowledge of languages where their assistance is required—especially of those northern dialects which form the warp and woof of English, and on which the flowers of Greece and Rome have been embroidered. In our own tongue he is master of all its powers; truly conveying that strong and distinct view of objects to others, in which his perspicacity exhibits them to himself.”—Quarterly Review, Vol. 35.

"This publication is just the kind of work wanted-a desideratum in our literature-but not at all proportioned to the copiousness of our language. We could, with pleasure to ourselves and our readers, multiply extracts; but we conclude by expressing a hope that Mr. Taylor may be induced to apply, to the further illustration of British synonymy, the powers which so eminently qualify him for the task, and that he will consider a proof of our admiration of those powers the hints we have presumed to give."-Quarterly Review, No. 70.

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Taylor's Synonyms Discriminated' will prove his lasting monument; they excited very general attention, and raised his reputation far higher than it had ever before stood."Quarterly Review, No. 145.

Nur selten wird ein Wort, oder eine Bedeutung, in allen den ein-
zelnen Fällen gebraucht, in welchen sie doch gebraucht werden könn-
ten alle diese unmerklich kleinen Schattierungen in den Bedeutun-
gen durch Worteauszudrücken, ist unmöglich; und alle die Fälle
anzuführen, in welchen ein Wort gebraucht werden kann, ist es nicht
weniger, wenn maun auch die unabsehliche Weitläufigkeit, die solches
würde verursachet haben, nicht mit in Rechnung bringen wollte
ADELUNG.

LONDON:

LUMLEY, 56, CHANCERY LANE.

STEVENS AND CO., PRINTERS, BELL YARD, TEMPLE BAR.

INTRODUCTION.

THE word synonym is compounded of the greek preposition ovv cum, and ovoμa nomen: it means therefore a fellow-name. Those terms are called synonymous, which describe the same things by other names: to synonymize is to express one thought in different phrases: synonymy is the use, a synonymist the user of synonyms, and synonymicon describes a dictionary of them.

Some languages, like the greek and german, are self-derived. When they have occasion to designate fresh objects, they do it by joining, in a new and definitive manner, terms already in use. They have been taught, for instance, to name the elements of modern chemistry by internal resources: oxygen, sauerstoff. In such languages no two words are a 3