January 18th is officially Thesaurus Day. For those that don’t know, a thesaurus is a book that lists words in groups of synonyms or related concepts. A thesaurus helps you find words that are interesting to use in place of other words.

When you rise to meet the break of day, you can see the first light of the sun showing you the crack of dawn. The birds will make a melody as they vocalize their chirps and cantillate their love of morning with the singsong serenade of chants, croons, and warbles.

You can celebrate their exaltation of life with blessings as you laud the day ahead, and rejoice as you prepare for the party that exults a new date on the calendar. Thesaurus day will help you broaden your horizons and your vocabulary, and take joy in the beauty of language!

History of Thesaurus Day

Thesaurus day is your opportunity to reintroduce yourself to that best friend of writers, the thesaurus. Whether you’re looking for a new word to spice up your vocabulary, or looking for precisely the right nuance to add to a sentence or phrase, a Thesaurus can be there to help you. While many of us don’t use the great expanse of verbiage that’s available to us, the expanse of language really gives us an amazing ability to express ourselves with beauty and precision.

Poets have long used words in their melodious composition of phrases to evoke the most powerful images, knowing that “very happy” is all good and well, but “exultant” brings about an entirely different scene to mind. What makes an author truly expert is knowing how to blend together words and scenes to capture the mind and really bring across the personality of the characters in their stories. When all you can think of is a “brown” pond, it’s so much better to grab that Thesaurus and find that the word Bistre really captures the heart and meaning you’re looking for. Thesaurus day is when we can defenestrate our old vocabulary, and use the new space to help build up something a bit more elegant.