Synonym

The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning.

Metonymy can sometimes be a form of synonymy: the White House is used as a synonym of the administration in referring to the U.S. executive branch under a specific president.

[citation needed] The analysis of synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, and hypernymy is inherent to taxonomy and ontology in the information science senses of those terms.

[11] Thus, today there exist synonyms like the Norman-derived people, liberty and archer, and the Saxon-derived folk, freedom and bowman.

Loanwords are another rich source of synonyms, often from the language of the dominant culture of a region.

In East Asia, borrowings from Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese often double native terms.

In Turkish, okul was coined to replace the Arabic-derived mektep and mederese, but those words continue to be used in some contexts.

Some writers avoid repeating the same word in close proximity, and prefer to use synonyms: this is called elegant variation.