Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- To deprive of synonymous character, as words of similar meaning; differentiate in signification; discriminate (synonymous words or phrases). Also spelled
desynonymise .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To deprive of synonymous character; to discriminate in use; -- applied to words which have been employed as synonyms.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To deprive of
synonymous character; to cause no longer to besynonyms .
Etymologies
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Examples
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It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize [22] those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own.
Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803
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