Excerpt from English Synonyms: Explained and Illustrated In offering this book to students of English I desire to make a most grateful acknowledgment of the assistance I have received from the New English Dictionary (A to K), the Century Dictionary, and the Standard Dictionary of the English Language (Funk and Wagnails). The quotations have, with very few exceptions, been collected at first hand and have been selected from a great variety of writers, scientific as well as literary. It has been my aim to point out the nicer distinctions between synonymous words with reference to the established usage of the present day and I have therefore confined myself to authors of the last fifty years. Among the writers that have been read for the purpose of this book are: W. M. Thackeray. George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, A. Geikie, R. Lydekker, A. W. Bickerton, Robert Ball. J. A. Froude. E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, Mandell Creighton, S. R. Gardiner, C. Oman, E. S. Beesly, Charles Firth, F. York Powell. J. McCarthy', C. Merivale, Frederick Harrison, J. W. Draper, James Bryce, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, Walter H. Pater, Leslie Stephen, E. Dowden, Sidney Lee, Richard Garnett, Arthur Symons, Mark Pattison, H. D. Traill, Austin Dobson, Lord Avebury, Alfred Tennyson. Stephen Phillips. J. Knight, H. Nettleship, P. L. Waterhouse, J. E. Phythian, J. Munro, T. H. S. Escott, Thomas Seccombe, Arnold-Forster, R. L. Stevenson, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, R. D. Blackmore, T. Watts-Dunton, J. M. Barrie, W. Besant, G. Moore, Mrs. Ward, F. Marion Crawford, A. Lang, B. Harraden, H. Rider Haggard. H. S. Merriman, John Oliver Hobbes, Stanley J. Weyman, A. Morrison, Rudyard Kipling, I. Maclaren, R. Whiteing, Jerome K. Jerome, W. Clark Russell, Lucas Malet, A. Conan Doyle, S. Baring-Gould, Margaret L. Woods, M. Cholmondeley, R. Buchanan, F. Anstev, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Henry James. W. D. Howells, T. B. Aldrich, Harold Frederic. Edward Whymper, Wilbur L. Cross, Henry A. Beers, Frank Norris, A. Bennett, G. Gissing, J. Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, G. B. Shaw, Compton Mackenzie, and H. Walpole. It is a fact known to every schoolboy that English has borrowed an immense number of words from other languages, especially from French and Latin. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.