n between the two, as also between many other words similarly
misused. Archdeacon Hare, too, has remarked upon the common
misapplication of such words as 'education' for 'instruction,'
'government' for 'administration,' 'the church' for 'the priesthood' or
'ministry;' and indeed holds that such a confounding of terms leads to
serious practical misunderstandings and confusions.[3] Any one, upon
reflection, will perceive that in the common use of these and numberless
other words, there is often a signal lack of clearness and precision,
and will hardly fail to notice that the error proceeds from a want of
due attention to the nice and peculiar meanings of words which are
vaguely presumed to have the same signification.

As a help to those who may wish to attain a somewhat more than common
correctness of style and language, Archbishop Whately has recently
published a small work on _English Synonyms_;[4] and the rapidity with
which the first edition has been disposed of leads us to infer that the
public is to some extent prepared to take an interest in the subject.
The second edition, 'revised and enlarged,' is now before us, and it is
thought that a brief glance at its contents may not be unacceptable to
some of our present readers.

The word 'synonym,' as the archbishop observes, is, in strict reality, a
misnomer. 'Literally, it implies an exact coincidence of meaning in two
or more words, in which case there would be no room for discussion; but
it is generally applied to words which would be more correctly termed
pseudo-synonyms--that is, words having a shade of difference, yet with a
sufficient resemblance of meaning to make them liable to be confounded.
And it is in the number and variety of these that, as the Abbe Girard
well remarks, the richness of a language consists. To have two or more
words with exactly the same sense, is no proof of copiousness, but
simply an inconvenience. A house would not be called well furnished from
its having a larger number of chairs and tables of one kind than were
needed, but from its having a separate article for each distinct use.
The more power we have of discriminating the nicer shades of meaning,
the greater facility we possess of giving force and precision to our
expressions. Our own language possesses great advantages in this
respect; for being partly derived from the Teutonic, and partly from the
Latin, we have a large number of duplicates from the two sources, which
are, for t