About our free online thesaurus

MacmillanDictionary.com contains a thesaurus with a difference. Many online thesauruses sit completely independently from a dictionary and generate an unsystematic and often overwhelming list from the word you have looked up. Faced with this list, it is often difficult to know which synonym to choose, and many words in the list might not relate to the meaning of the word you have searched.

The free online thesaurus from Macmillan thesaurus is fully integrated into the dictionary entries, giving you a targeted list of synonyms and words related exactly to the meaning you are looking for.

Nearly every entry in MacmillanDictionary.com has a corresponding thesaurus entry, introduced by the symbol . Click anywhere on this line to open the free thesaurus, giving you the most frequent and useful synonyms or related words for every single meaning of the word you have looked up.

Some words (such as happy or stroll) have thesaurus entries which show you synonyms for that word. Others, (such as tennis, tree or house) generate related terms, showing you, for example, types of house or species of tree. To make the thesaurus entries even easier to use:

• a short definition is included underneath each synonym or related word
• you can click on on any word in the list to see the full dictionary definition
• you can scroll down for further categories of synonyms, antonyms and related words

The word 'thesaurus' comes from the Ancient Greek meaning 'treasure trove' or 'storehouse'. The MacmillanDictionary.com free online English thesaurus is exactly that. More than just a list of synonyms, it places each word in context, draws distinctions between similar words and helps you choose just the word you need. And with its links to related categories, it widens your vocabulary at the click of a button.