Usually, children will already have been encouraged to replace ‘boring’ adjectives such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with more interesting ones like ‘fantastic’ or ‘terrible’ in creative writing, so the concept is not entirely new. The National Curriculum requires children to be taught how words are related as synonyms in Year 6. Some examples of literacy synonyms include: It only develops when adults talk with children about the world around them and the books (stories and non-fiction) they read with them and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together. Literacy language comprehension (necessary for both reading and writing) starts from birth. It helps us to communicate with others, express our thoughts and ideas and learn new things. Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen. If you’re still asking “what does ‘synonym’ mean?”, then let’s use the word ‘literacy’ as an example. This time, ‘happy’ and ‘contented’ have the most similar meaning in the context, whereas ‘joyful’ and ‘cheery’ don’t sound quite right!

Let’s try another literacy synonyms example: In this context, ‘happy’, ‘cheery’ and ‘joyful’ all have very, very similar meanings, but ‘contented’ sounds strange. In fact, there are cases where a synonym might even be a better choice than the original word you’ve chosen.įor example, let’s look at our synonyms of ‘happy’: Synonyms often have very slight differences in meaning, which sometimes means one is more appropriate than another one in a given context. That’s why it’s always a good idea to have synonyms ready to keep your language fresh. It can be easy to fall into the trap of repeating the same word over and over again. Synonyms are a useful way to add some variation to your language when you’re writing or speaking in longform. If you’d like to learn more about what does a synonym mean and what its function is, we recommend that you take a look at another of our Twinkl Teaching Wikis, ' What is a Synonym for Lesson?'. You can find literacy synonyms by looking up your word in a thesaurus, which is a special type of dictionary for finding synonyms and antonyms. For example, an antonym of ‘happy’ is ‘sad’. Antonyms are the opposite of synonyms, so the meaning of an antonym is the opposite of your word. When learning about literacy synonyms, you will often also find references to antonyms. For example, synonyms of 'happy' include 'joyful', 'cheery' and 'contented'. We’ll also explain where they fall into the National Curriculum and how you can teach your class about them.Ī synonym is a word, morpheme or phrase which has the exact same meaning, or a very similar meaning, to another word. In this handy teaching wiki, we’ll go over what synonyms are and how they can be used in a sentence.

If you’re wondering “what does ‘synonym’ mean?”, then you’re in the right place.

There are synonym