Words That Mean…

The same list, grouped by meaning instead of by letter. 42 sets covering 430 words — and, more usefully, an explanation of how the near-synonyms inside each set differ from one another.

That last part is the point. A thesaurus will tell you that frugal and parsimonious both mean careful with money. It will not tell you that the first is a compliment and the second is not — which is exactly what a test question turns on.

How this list was chosen

These sets are chosen by hand, not generated. We tried generating them — grouping the word list by shared synonyms — and it produced one bucket of 163 unrelated words, and another that filed soothe and insolent together because a single synonym bridged them. Meaning does not cluster cleanly enough to automate.

So each set starts from a hand-written list of anchor terms, a word joins it only by matching one of those anchors, and the results were then read through and pruned: 66 words were removed for arriving by a false route — obliterate reached “unclear” through obscure in its verb sense, and objective reached “disagree” through the noun object.

Six more concepts — generous, stingy, humble, brave, honest, strange — were written but not published, because our list holds fewer than six words for each. A set that thin teaches nothing that the word list does not already.