Now it's easier than ever to find just the right word--to make your writing assignment or speech sparkle or to add new degrees of precision to your vocabulary. Here's an alphabetical listing of synonyms and antonyms, as easy to use as a dictionary, that gets words from the "tip of your tongue" to your fingertips--quickly!

American thesauruses generally fall into two categories: the voluminous, subject-indexed variety and the brief, alphabetically arranged dictiouary-style book. Many people find the subject-index thesaurus difficult to use because the breakdown of senses is overrefined and overlapping.One must often turn to two or three places to find synonyms for any one sense,and even so one frequently finds few apt synonyms and much redundancy, as well as a hodgepodge of antiquated cliches, phrases that are really brief definitions rather then synonyms, and words so artificially composed of Latin or Greek elements that it would be safe to say they have appeared nowhere else other than in thesauruses. On the other hand, the shorter,ulphabetical thesauruses often give too few synonyms to be helpful.One is trapped between the Scylla of parsimony and the Charybdis of overabundance.

Preface

Guide to the Use of This Thesaurus

The Thesaurus