Section 6.6. Accessing Word s Thesaurus

6.6. Accessing Word's Thesaurus

A well-thumbed thesaurus sits on many writers' bookshelves, somewhere between Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations . By providing synonyms and antonyms to common words, a thesaurus helps writers find what Flaubert called le mot juste "the perfect word." Word's thesaurus (Figure 6-16) makes it so easy to look up a synonym that your hard-copy thesaurus may start gathering dust.

Figure 6-16. To use Word's thesaurus, just right-click a word, and then choose synonyms from the shortcut menu. Choose a word from the list, or, if you need more research, at the bottom of the menu, choose Thesaurus to open a thesaurus in the Research task pane.

To use Word's thesaurus, just right-click any word in your document, and then point to Synonyms in the pop-up menu. A submenu appears with appropriate synonyms. If that's not enough for you, at the bottom of the menu, click the Thesaurus option to open the Research task pane, with your word entered in the "Search for" box (Figure 6-16). Click the green arrow to look up the reference.