My Favorite Thesaurus (481 words)

I love the English language. In the underrated activity of speaking in person with other human beings—sharing air space in the meatspace—we reach for favorite words we tend to use, and even overuse. This is OK. I’ve been very fond of the word “beguiled” lately. It’s a pretty word, and it neatly describes our relationship to the Internet generally, and social media specifically—we are beguiled by it. Beguiled has a sense of being dreamily engrossed, but also of being deluded or bamboozled. It also has a third, more archaic sense of frittering away time, which is certainly applicable.

This little dive into the word “beguiled” is courtesy of The Synonym Finder, edited by one Jerome Rodale (1898-1971)[1]. I discovered the book in my study at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, where I spent two weeks at a writing residency in 2020. The Synonym Finder is the best thesaurus I’ve ever used,[2] by far the most comprehensive—it claims to have more words than any book of its kind, more than 1.5 million of them.

English is said to have more words than most other languages. It has a peculiar capacity to add new words—it borrows easily from other languages, and our dictionaries are larger because we retain words with similar meanings from different sources (e.g., ask [Old English], question [French], interrogate [Latin]). 

I often wonder about the future of my mother tongue. What will happen to all those words in The Synonym Finder? In the relatively near future, the ability to read a book all the way through from front to back will be a rare and potentially valuable skill. The ability to write unaided will be even more rare, like the monks in their tower in The Name of the Rose. An archaic specialty. We think of this as a new era of Medievalism—of mass illiteracy—but most people will continue to be literate, albeit in a semi-pictogrammic language that’s indecipherable to readers today.

English is a living language, and that notion implies a life cycle, including a death, ultimately. Much as I love my language, this does not distress me, in the same way that Latin no longer being spoken does not distress me. We will always need to express ourselves with subtlety and elegance. Let us be delivered from fear of change.

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[1] Rodale himself is a fascinating figure, mostly remembered for promoting organic farming and healthy eating. He wrote a book dubiously titled Happy People Rarely Get Cancer and dropped dead of a heart attack at age 72 on the set of the Dick Cavett Show, where he had, minutes before, told the host, “I’ve decided to live to be a hundred.” Cavett’s 2007 essay about the event in the New York Times is a great read.

[2] When I do not have The Synonym Finder handy, I use Merriam-Webster’s online thesaurus: https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/