The Birthday of a Useful Book
A thesaurus doesn’t exist to make you sound smarter. It exists to help you find the word you already meant. Those are very different jobs.Share on X
Thesaurus Day falls on January 18, the birthday of Peter Mark Roget, the man who compiled the first one. It’s a small holiday for a tool every writer owns and most writers misuse.
I keep a thesaurus on my desk, and most people misuse one. Somewhere along the line, school taught a lot of us that repeating a word is a sin and a longer word earns a better grade. That lesson has wrecked more sentences than bad grammar ever did.
A thesaurus is a list of words grouped by meaning. That’s all it is.
Used correctly, it’s among the most useful things on a writer’s desk, a way to find the exact word that’s been sitting just out of reach. Used incorrectly, it’s a weapon writers turn on their own prose, swapping plain words for fancy ones in the belief that bigger means better.
The difference between those two uses is the story of the thesaurus, and it’s worth getting right.
Watch: Peter Roget and His Thesaurus | STUFF YOU MISSED IN HISTORY CLASS, Stuff You Missed in History Class
The Trap of the Fancy Word
Synonyms are almost never exact. “Walked,” “strode,” and “sauntered” aren’t the same. The thesaurus shows you options. It doesn’t tell you which one is true.Share on X
Here’s the trap, and almost every new writer falls into it. They use the thesaurus to replace simple words with impressive ones, and the writing gets worse.
Synonyms are almost never exact. The thesaurus lists “start” next to “commence,” but they’re not the same. “Start” is clean and direct. “Commence” is a bureaucrat trying to sound important.
The thesaurus shows you a row of options and lets you believe they’re interchangeable. They’re not, because “walked,” “strode,” “sauntered,” and “ambled” all describe moving on foot and each one means something different. Pick the wrong one for the sound of it and you’ve put a false note in your sentence.
That’s how a thesaurus damages prose. A writer reaches for the fanciest synonym to seem smart, and instead they seem like they swallowed a dictionary. The reader feels the strain. Big words used to impress are one of the surest signs of an insecure writer.
Nothing makes me put a manuscript down faster than a writer showing off a vocabulary. I can feel the thesaurus open on the desk beside them, and after a page of it I stop trusting anything the book says. Readers catch this sooner than writers think, and they don’t forgive it.
How to Use One
The right way to use a thesaurus is the opposite of how most people use it. You use it to find the word you already meant.
It’s built for this situation. You know exactly the meaning you want, but the precise word is stuck just out of reach. You can feel the shape of it and can’t quite grab it. That’s when the thesaurus is worth having. You look up the near-word you do have, scan the list, and there it is, the exact term that says what you meant. That’s sharpening, finding the right word.
This is the use I’ll always stick up for. The tip-of-the-tongue problem is maddening, and a thesaurus fixes it in ten seconds. That’s a tool doing its job, and nobody should feel like a cheat for reaching for it.
The test is simple. If the word the thesaurus gave you is one you know and would recognize, use it. If it’s a word you would have to look up to be sure of, put it back. The best word is almost always the simple, precise one you already had.
The thesaurus just helps you remember it. For more on this, the dictionary is the tool that tells you what a word means, and the thesaurus is the tool that helps you find it. Use them together.
That test is blunt on purpose. If you’d have to look a word up to be sure of it, your reader will too, and most of them won’t bother. They’ll skim past it and think a little less of the book.
How do you spend Thesaurus Day?
Open a thesaurus and play with it, but play with it the right way. Take a sentence you’ve written that feels almost right and find the one word that’s not pulling its weight.
Look up that weak word and scan for the precise replacement.
Notice how often the best choice is short and plain. Then run the reverse drill: find a sentence where you used a fancy word to sound smart and swap it back to the simple one. Read both versions aloud. The plain one will win almost every time, and I’d like every writer who’s ever typed “commence” to sit through that drill until it sticks.