Look just below the definition of “laud” at the “COLLOCATES” section.
REPERTOIRE SYNONYM HOW TO
Using collocates to learn how to use a word in a sentence Also, this definition of “laud” is exactly what I’m looking for, so this seems like a great word for the performance review! But how do I use it in a sentence? Thankfully, collocates can help. This time, I choose “laud” from the list, look it up in the dictionary, and discover it means “to praise” – great! Just to make sure that “laud” is appropriate for my paper, I also decide to search for the word in the Word and Phrase Tool.Īlthough laud is most frequently used in newspapers, it certainly appears in academic writing, too. “Assign great social importance” isn’t the kind of “praise” I had in mind, so “lionize” is definitely not the synonym I want.Īfter deciding against “lionize,” I go back to the thesaurus. It’s probably not the best choice for my academic paper, but I’ll look at the definition to the right of the bar graph to be sure. From this bar, I can see that academic writers seldom use the term “lionize,” but non-academic writers–those who write magazine articles and newspaper articles– seem to like the word. OK, after figuring out all these parts, the corpus is starting to make sense to me.Īs it turns out, the frequency information is also shown in a bar graph near the middle of the screen. “TOTAL” indicates the number of times “lionize” appears in the entire corpus, followed by subtotals in each genre. If I search for a word that has multiple entries in the upper-right part of the screen, I just click on the “PoS” value (in this example, the purple “V”) to select only a particular form of the word. Many words in English belong to multiple parts of speech. “PoS” means part of speech lionize is listed as “V” for verb. Words with low ranks are more commonly used than words with higher ranks. The area to the right of the search box gives information about the word “lionize.” “RANK #” ranks the word within the top 60,000 most frequently-used words in the entire corpus. The page returns a LOT of information all at once. To spice up my language, I’ve consulted a thesaurus for synonyms for praise, and I found the word “lionize.” So, I type “lionize” into the WORD box and click search. I’m looking for a synonym of “praise” because I’ve been repeating it in an academic paper about a performance I saw earlier this semester at Memorial Hall. Searching for a word and interpreting results For today, I’m just going to focus on the first function, so I clicked on the “Frequency list” link and looked at the search bar in the upper-left part of the screen. The second function, input/analyze texts, uploads phrases or larger blocks of text to analyze how our language use compares to examples in the corpus. The first function, the frequency list, lets me search for usage information about particular words. To access the Word and Phrase Tool, I went to.
But, as I worked through some of the examples below, I gradually familiarized myself with the tool and its functions. I’ll admit that it can be intimidating at first. That said, the website itself has a bit of a learning curve.
The tool is a free, powerful, and simple language tool that I think should be in every writer’s repertoire. Davies released the Word and Phrase Tool, which allows users to perform queries within the COCA using a web interface.
The corpus even details how language use differs between different academic disciplines. It contains more than 1 billion words, in nearly a half-million texts, evenly divided across six genres (TV/movie subtitles, spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals) to give writers a sense of how specific word usages vary in different contexts. The one I’ll look at today– the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)–was created by Professor Mark Davies. That language resource exists: it’s called a corpus.Ī corpus is a collection of language examples. While a dictionary or a thesaurus can help me research these questions, I sometimes want a collection of real examples of the way language is used in real sentences. How is this word usually used in a sentence? Does this sound right? Is this formal enough? All of these come to mind as I write. The Word and Phrase Tool is a resource that I use to answer questions about my language use. The Word and Phrase Tool: Vocabulary and Writing in Academia
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