A Complete Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms / or, Synonyms and Words of Opposite Meaning

1898
BY
The Rt. Rev. Samuel Fallows, A.M., B.D.
DIGITISED AND RESET BY STEVE WOOD 2016 OCR, EDITS & EXTENSIVE but not EXHAUSTIVE OCR-CORRECTIONS, LAYOUT for JUST THE SYNONYMS & ANTONYMS (NOT THE APPENDICES).
Wishing to have an extensive list of Synonyms and Antonyms for another project, I settled on Fallows’ amazing publication. However, I could not find an OCR text which was clear of the many OCR-scan errors. I did my own OCR, which joined many of the line-end hyphenated words automatically, but which still resulted in a very large number of nearly identical (to other OCR scans) errors. This is probably not the fault of the OCR software, but rather of the quality of the 19 th Century source type and ink, which tended to be far from crisp. The software was not entirely perfect though and it would often invert n and u, or render either of those letters as ii, and render i as l (lower case L). R and K were regularly mixed, so ROCK could be rendered as KOCR – if it managed to get the circular letters correct. Just one example of variation is to be found in the rendering of the coded abbreviation for SYNONYM, ‘SYN.’ It might be rendered with a period, comma, both or none; and some of these variations were recorded: \ BTH \ 2vN. \ 8_vs. \ BYN, \ KYN. \ PYN. \ RYN. \ SIN, \ Srn. \ STIC. \ STK. \ STN. \ STN., \ STW. \ SVN_ \ SXN. \ SY.V. \ SY:. \ SYH. \ SYK. \ SYN, \ Syn, \ SYN . \ SYN. \ SYN._ \ SYS,. \ SYS. \ SYW. \ SYX\. and \ YX\. ! I know! Grrr!
I did, in fact, Google several scores of unrecognised but right-looking words and found many were accurate though out of common use in today’s English. Victorian English vocab was quite extensive. Did Fallows do a dictionary of word meanings (I wish)?
· Serendip Clip, Nowra, NSW, Australia, February 2016.
Update August, 2022: This is NOT a replication of the book. It is highly reformatted, apparently to create a parsable file for data input. Many corrections have been made, but there are still a large number of bad words, formatting errors, and mismatched internal references.