| If you find yourself overusing a particular word and want to find a good synonym for it, or if you want to get some ideas for livening up your text, Word's thesaurus can help. To use the thesaurus, follow these steps: -
Select the word that you want to look up, and press Shift+F7 (or choose Tools, Language, Thesaurus ). (You can also right-click the word and choose Look Up in the context menu.) -
Word displays the Research task pane with the word you selected in the Search For text box and suggested meanings, synonyms, and sometimes even antonyms in the results list (meanings are in boldface), as shown in Figure 11.14. Figure 11.14. The Research task pane lets you hunt for alternative word choices.  -
If the meaning at the top of the results list is not the one you need, scroll down the list to look for other meanings. -
If you see a plus sign next to a meaning, click the meaning to display its synonyms. To hide the synonyms, click the meaning again. -
If you want to see the synonyms of a synonym in the results list, click it. Word places the word in the Search for list and displays its synonyms in the results list. To go back to the previous contents of the results list, click the Back button immediately above the list. -
When you see the word that you want to use, point to it, click the down arrow to its right, and click Insert in the list that drops down. Word replaces the selected word with the one you chose. -
When you are finished, close the Research task pane.  | If you want to look up synonyms for a word that isn't in the results list, select the current entry in the Search for text box, type over it with the word whose synonyms you want to look up, and click the Start Searching button (the green arrow) or press Enter. |
You can quickly look up the synonyms for a word without taking a trip to the Research task pane. Just right-click the word and point to Synonyms in the context menu to display a list of synonyms. |
