Lotus
Advice and recommendation to expand my lexicon How can I systematically expand my vocabulary in terms of specific words, say different parts of a door, action words similar to "throw", etc? Are there any reference books that I can access to gain more words like the aforementioned type? Thank you very much:)
Nov 23, 2016 12:53 AM
Answers · 3
1
I've seen visual dictionaries. But I think nowadays your best resource is the Internet, particularly Google Images. A Google Image search for "parts of a door" worked beautifully. Wikipedia articles are very good, too, because an article on, say, "sheep" will naturally introduce a lot of sheep-related vocabulary (ovine, ewe, ram, tup, wether, lamb, fleece, mutton, pelt... and in fact the article on "sheep" even led me to a "Glossary of sheep husbandry.") The traditional reference volume for expanding vocabulary by finding synonyms is called a "thesaurus." Personally, I have never found thesauri to be very useful, but perhaps you will. Again, there are no-cost online thesauri. When I enter "throw" into thesaurus.com, it shows me a long list of related words including hurl, lob, pitch, cast, catapult, chuck, launch, precipitate, project, scatter, sling, strew, toss...
November 23, 2016
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