Philosophy and linguistic theory followed. Dictionaries of synonyms were published in English from the 18th century, and Roget’s invention of the modern thesaurus in 1852 brought more attention to the problem of how words relate to one another. In modern times, synonymy was initially a problem that lexicographers tackled. But languages tolerate a large amount of semantic overlap and replication of meanings in different registers. It would be economical for languages to avoid absolute synonymy, and indeed they seem to. Like its converse, polysemy, lexical synonymy undermines linguistic economy-having more than one form to express a single meaning is inefficient.
Finally, synonyms may be categorized by their non-referential meaning differences, such as register ( tired~knackered), dialect ( highway~motorway), or language ( dog~chien). Other synonym terms distinguish types of semantic overlap between words: identity of sense (perfect, or exact, synonymy: myopia~near-sightedness) versus overlap (near-synonymy: advice~suggestion) similar but non-identical referents (plesionymy: fog~mist) and differences in level of specificity (hyponymy: shoe~footwear). For example, coat has different synonyms for its senses ‘outer garment’ (e.g., jacket) and ‘covering layer’(e.g., layer). Synonymy is a relation between individual senses of words, so that a single word typically has different sets of synonyms for each of its senses. Absolute synonyms are substitutable in all possible contexts in all possible (semantic, grammatical, sociolinguistic) ways.
The usual test for synonymy is substitution: if one expression can be replaced by another in a sentence without change to the meaning of the sentence, then the two expressions are said to be synonyms. These positions depend entirely on how one defines the term: either as “similarity of meaning” or “identity of meaning,” respectively. Those who write about synonymy (in earlier works, often synonymity) tend to claim either that it is the most common lexical relation or that it does not exist.
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