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Referring to a Thesaurus

A thesaurus is a reference book that gives synonyms and antonyms for words. A thesaurus helps you in two ways:

1. It helps you find just the right word for your writing.
2. It keeps you from using the same words again and again.
3. If a thesaurus is organized alphabetically, look up the word as you would in a regular dictionary. If you have a traditional thesaurus, look for your word in the book’s index.

Finding the Best Word

A thesaurus would be helpful if you needed one effective word to mean laugh suddenly in the following sentence.

After reading the list of synonyms, you decide on guffawed because it fits best.