Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 15:23:07 -0000
From: Jaime 
Subject: Can you please help me?

> I apologise for bothering you but I was wondering if you could help me
> with a problem I have been trying to solve for three weeks now, and
> while I understand that this is not the ideal forum in which to ask
> for help, I would deeply appreciate any help you could give.

> I have been trying to find the word in the english language which has
> the most synonyms.

Okay, here's where I have to disappoint you, I'm afraid.

You see, synonyms are not as simple as you may suppose,
and counting them just isn't possible to the degree of
accuracy one would need to be able to come up with the
one word that 'has the most synonyms'.

I'm assuming that what you mean by a word's having a synonym is that
there is another word, different from the original, that has 'the same
meaning' as the original word.  I put 'the same meaning' in quotes to
emphasize that that's where the problem lies.  In meaning, that is.

Meaning is very slippery stuff, and comes in all kinds of shapes.
We might think that "pretty" and "beautiful" were synonyms, for
instance; but others might not, since there are lots of cases where
you'd use one and not the other, and most people would say that
"beautiful" is somehow 'stronger' than "pretty".  So, are they
synonyms or not?  The answer has to be that it depends, I'm afraid.

That's the way it turns out for almost every pair of words.  There's
an old adage that says there are no genuine synonyms in a language,
because if there were, then one would be unnecessary and you could use
it to mean something else.  And so it develops a different meaning.

Happens all the time. There are some pretty fair examples of synonymy
that get generated by dialect mergers; what they call it in one place
may be a different word from what they call it somewhere else, and on
the border between the dialects you hear both. But that's the exception
rather than the rule.

Anyway, the Executive Summary is that there just isn't any way to
determine which English word has the most synonyms, because you can't
determine synonymy exactly or consistently enough to count instances.

> It's for a short story I've been writing and though it seems a simple
> task, it has turned out to be impossibly hard to solve.

Well, hopefully now you see some reasons why that's so.

However, since it's for a story, you, as the author of the
story, can exercise your creative powers and deem that some
word with a lot of synonyms listed in the dictionary is
officially determined to have 'the most synonyms in English'.
Who's to stop you, after all?  It's a story, not a dictionary.

> I have tried emailing the webmasters of various homepages devoted to
> language, but these have been met with a barrage of insulting replies
> that cite the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the first line, and then
> question my intelligence for the next twenty.

Well, shame on them, then.  That's no way to treat people who ask
questions.  On the other hand, you *are* asking them to do something
impossible, even if you didn't realize it; and they're *very* busy --
especially at this time of year, when there's usually some academic
business like a term winding up. So I can imagine they were irritated.

You can avoid future such irritations by checking out what facts there
are the next time you need a special fact.  A good place to find answers
to almost any question about the English language that *have* answers
is David Crystal's "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language",
which should be in every library and classroom in the English-speaking
world.

> If you could offer any advice on who I may be able to speak to, or
> where I might find the answer I would be very grateful. Failing that,
> I apologise once again for wasting your time.

No need to apologize; questions are how we learn, after all.
Just check out the chapters on vocabulary and meaning in Crystal.

> Thanking you in advance,
> Jaime
> Sydney, Australia.

You're welcome,
John Lawler
Ask A Linguistics Tutor  
Ann Arbor, Michigan