About

Suaviloquy: swah-VIL-oh-kwee · sweetness of speech (Webster, 1913).

Each day this site presents one of the 619 entries in James C. Fernald’s English Synonyms and Antonyms (1914), with the word’s definitions from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913). The entries recur in a fixed order, each once every 619 days, the day being decided by the reader’s local date.

Fernald’s work explains the distinctions between words of kindred meaning; his paragraphs are reproduced as he wrote them. Every word he enters, or lists as a synonym or antonym (6,548 words), has a page, as does every headword in Webster’s (about 96,000 more).

Sources

Both books are in the public domain and come from Project Gutenberg: Fernald and Webster. The text was extracted from those editions by a program; as their layout carries little structure, a definition is occasionally attached to the wrong place.

Pictures

30 words have pictures (89 pictures in all), public-domain works from the open-access collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Met. Each was chosen by hand for how well it fits the sense Fernald gives the word, and each links to its museum’s page.

Books and essays

The book shown comes from Standard Ebooks, and the essay from The Public Domain Review.

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