ABSTRACT
Synonyms are words of like significance in the main, but with a certain unlikeness as well. The terms, however, are not ordinarily so used; and plainly they are not so, when it is undertaken to trace out the distinction between synonyms; for without undertaking to deny that there may be such absolutely coincident words, such perfect synonyms, yet these could not be the object of any such discrimination; since, where there was no real distinction, it would be lost labour and the exercise of a perverse ingenuity to attempt to draw one. There are indeed those who affirm that words in one language are never exactly synonymous, in all respects commensurate, with words in another; that, when they are compared, there is always something more or something less, or something different, in these and in those.
