Synonyms and antonyms: examples and practice

What synonyms and antonyms are

A synonym is a word that means the same, or almost the same, as another word. Begin and start are synonyms. An antonym is a word that means the opposite. Begin and finish are antonyms. A simple way to remember which is which: synonym and same both start with s, and antonym sounds like anti, which means against.

Knowing both helps children read and write. When reading, a synonym or an antonym nearby is often the clue to a new word: The room was not tidy at all; it was chaotic. When writing, synonyms stop the same word from appearing again and again. A story where everything is nice comes alive when things are cozy, delicious or thrilling instead.

Synonyms for kids: examples

• Happy: cheerful, glad, joyful, delighted
• Big: large, huge, enormous, gigantic
• Fast: quick, rapid, speedy, swift
• Scared: afraid, frightened, terrified
• Look: glance, peek, stare, gaze
• Shout: yell, holler, bellow

Synonyms are rarely exact copies. They differ in strength and feeling, which teachers call shades of meaning. Glance and stare both mean looking, but a glance is quick and a stare is long. Thrifty and stingy can describe the same careful spender, but stingy sounds much less kind. Choosing the right shade is what makes writing precise.

Antonyms: examples of opposites

• Hot and cold, wet and dry, open and closed
• Arrive and depart, accept and refuse, remember and forget
• Ancient and modern, generous and selfish, brave and cowardly

Some antonyms are made with a prefix rather than a new word: happy and unhappy, agree and disagree, possible and impossible. Some pairs have a scale between them. Hot and cold are opposites, but warm and cool sit in the middle. Other pairs, like alive and dead, have nothing in between. And not every word has an antonym at all: there is no opposite of pencil or Tuesday.

Picture it as a line

Draw a line with freezing at one end and boiling at the other. Write cold, cool, warm and hot in order along it. Words close together on the line are near synonyms, and words at opposite ends are antonyms. Children can build lines for other sets too: tiny to gigantic, whisper to shout, or crawl to sprint.

Putting words in order like this is the same skill the practice set checks when it asks for the strongest or the weakest word in a group. It also makes a good game: give your child three words on cards and ask them to lay the cards out from mildest to strongest.

How it is taught in school

In the US, Common Core starts in kindergarten, where children relate common verbs and adjectives to their opposites (L.K.5.b). Grades 1 and 2 focus on shades of meaning between related words, such as toss, throw and hurl (L.1.5.d and L.2.5.b). Grade 4 asks students to understand words through their antonyms and through synonyms with similar but not identical meanings (L.4.5.c), and grade 5 uses synonyms, antonyms and homographs to understand each word better (L.5.5.c).

In England, the national curriculum names synonyms and antonyms in Year 6, where pupils learn how words are related by meaning, with big, large and little as the example. Younger pupils work with opposites and word choices long before they learn the terms.

Helping at home

• Play opposites on a car ride: you say a word and your child says its antonym as fast as they can.
• Look up a word in a thesaurus together, then talk about which synonym fits a particular sentence best and why.
• When your child writes very or nice, ask for one stronger word instead: very big could become enormous.
• Try the practice set below, then print a fresh synonyms and antonyms worksheet with an answer key.