Peter E. Meltzer - The Thinkers Thesaurus

Praise for The Thinkers Thesaurus

The Thinkers Thesaurus s blend of description and recommendation yields a highly practical, profoundly engaging, and utterly enjoyable book. It improves on most thesauri in ways so plain and simple that one wonders why this approach has not yet become standard practice in the field.

Dr. Stefan Dollinger, professor of English linguistics, University of British Columbia

A million dollars worth of fifty-cent wordsentertaining to read, and handy for anyone looking for just the right (exceptional) word.

Erin McKean, editor, Verbatim

The best and most interesting thesauruses are compiled by individuals, not companies. First Roget, then Rodale and McCutcheon, and now Meltzer, whose Thinkers Thesaurus is endlessly readable and wonderfully instructive.

Robert Hartwell Fiske, author of The Dictionary of Concise Writing

Peter Meltzers Thinkers Thesaurus provides synonyms for writers who have already considered the typical array of standard substitutes and who have already exhausted the resources of other thesaurus tools. The book is useful and entertaining, with a user-friendly format. A word-lovers dessert!

Cynthia L. Hallen, editor of the Emily Dickinson Lexicon

The Thinkers Thesaurus will help you to discover and employ not the almost-right word but the most target-center word to help you say what you really want to say.

Richard Lederer, author of A Man of My Words

What fun! This volume makes it easy to keep ones prose from being prosaic.

Joan Hall, chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English

Addressed to a cultivated readership and winking at the elegant writer, The Thinkers Thesaurus revitalizes the potential of the vast lexical inventory of English. This gaily colored gallery displaying the authors fondness for hard words is a must-visit for language fetishists and anyone interested in le mot juste a fully-enjoyable reference tool definitely worth reading from alpha to omega.

Cristiano Furiassi, author of False Anglicisms in Italian

In The Thinkers Thesaurus , Peter Meltzer advocates hard wordsunusual, arresting, precise words. Writers shouldnt lard their prose with them, but when that one unexpectedly right word is perfectly placed on just the right occasion, an otherwise homespun sentence can shine or sparkle. If youre a serious writer, you need to know these words and you need a guide to use them wellyou need this book.

Michael Adams, president of the Dictionary Society of North America

Delves into the mostly untapped reservoir of the English lexicon, offering readers more than top-of-mind word choices.

Dow Jones Newsletter

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The Thinker's Thesaurus

Copyright 2015, 2010, 2005, by Peter E. Meltzer

Foreword copyright 2015 by Orin Hargraves

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
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Book design by Abbate Design

Production manager: Louise Mattarelliano

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Meltzer, Peter E., 1958 author.

The Thinkers thesaurus : sophisticated alternatives to common words /

Peter E. Meltzer. Expanded Third Edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-393-35125-5 (pbk.)

1. English languageSynonyms and antonyms. I. Title.

PE1591.M464 2015

423'.12dc23

2015012077

ISBN 978-0-393-33897-3 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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TO LILLY, LAUREN, ZOE, AND KONSTANTIN.

Thank you for everything.

FOREWORD

Orin Hargraves, former president of the Dictionary Society of North America

English occupies an estate so vast that few of us ever have the opportunity to explore all of it definitively. We are born into a small corner of it. Reading, conversation, and education provide opportunities for us to acquaint ourselves with some of its less frequented byways, majestic ruins, or fervid sweatshops. However, the exigencies of modern life require most of us, at some point, to desist from active exploration of the lexicon, simply in order to accomplish the things we have to do.

But there is still that wanderlust, the desire to reopen an occluded passageway or to declare ourselves au fait with a remote but strategic corner of the territory of English. This new, expanded third edition of Peter Meltzers excellent Thinkers Thesaurus is at once a testament to the desire in all of us to bring a broader spectrum of the dominion of English under our command, and a guide that will help us in accomplishing the same. With The Thinkers Thesaurus on your shelf, you need never again experience that feeling that you have not found exactly the right word.

Only a rare mind possesses all of the qualities required to compile and write a work of such scope as the one that lies before you: it requires a deep and broad understanding of English literature, a deft and acute analytical perspective, and a penchant for close and unblinking attention to detail in a task that would drive most writers to distraction. As the eighteenth century opened to the nineteenth, we had Peter Mark Roget, whose monumental work is consulted to this day. Now as the twentieth century has given way to the twenty-first, we have Peter E. Meltzer to expand and augment the ongoing expedition into English. Enjoy and benefit from the variegated fruits of his labor. You, and English generally, will be better for it!

INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION

Say you are asked to write reviews of novels by two authors. You believe that one author writes beautifully and uses exactly the right words for the right occasions but the other writes in a pompous and pretentious style. You want to express these sentiments elegantly, but without using boring and mundane language.

So you turn to conventional thesauruses. These will invariably take a word (the base word) and then simply list a bunch of synonyms for it. But which word is synonymous with beautiful writing or, conversely, writing in a pretentious style? What one word or phrase is synonymous with the perfect word? There is none, of course, and thus regular thesauruses are of no help. The word word is obviously not synonymous with the perfect word , and the word pretentious, by itself, is not synonymous with the use of pretentious words specifically. The word writing doesnt do the trick either. So check out any regular thesaurus and you will not see any entries for any word or phrase meaning elegant writing or the perfect word or the use of pretentious words.

Heres another question: Aside from being non-run-of-the-mill, what do the following words have in common and why are conventional thesauruses unable to accurately include any of them? Gynecic, nulliparous, Junoesque, anile, puerperal, misandrist, sylph, virago, slattern, and bluestocking?

Answer: They all relate to women. But they cannot accurately be included in conventional thesauruses for two reasons. First, none of them is synonymous with woman, standing alone, in the same way that, say, female might be. Second, in the case of the first five words, they are all adjectives, and woman is obviously a noun. Thats problem two.