Can you give me two words WHICH have the same meaning? Any two words? How about 'whole' and 'entire'? The last time someone asked about the difference between these two words, nobody could think of a situation where you could use one but not the other. We came to the conclusion that they were interchangeable. The English language has many many near-synonyms. These are words which have the same meaning but aren't interchangeable in every situation. There are actually relatively few 'true' synonyms.

For a number of reasons, there are many words in English that have similar meanings and some of them actually have almost exactly the same meaning. These are called "synonyms". For example, "meaning" and "definition" have very similar meanings. The difficulty is not in finding two words with the same meaning. The challenge is to understand that a word may have many meanings and so two words may not share all the same meanings. For example, "push" and "shove" have very similar meanings and one could almost say that they are synonyms. However, to say that someone "shoved" you implies somewhat more rudeness or hostility than saying that they "pushed" you. Also, "push" has other meanings that are not shared by "shove".

There must be thousands and thousands of such pairs. English is rich in synonyms. One reason is that it draws core vocabulary from two different sources, Anglo-Saxon and Latin. It borrows from many other languages as well. Here are a few examples off the top of my head. They may not be perfect because over time words acquire different shades of meaning. The Olympic stadium is big/large. Junk food makes you fat/obese. In Boston, the trains run in underground/subterranean tunnels. Throw this food out, it has a bad smell/odor.

Does the English language use words interchangeably?