Designed to complement "The Oxford Compact English Dictionary", this comprehensive thesaurus provides thousands of alternative words to choose from to aid letter, essay and report writing, and crossword puzzles and creative writing. As well as full coverage of general English, the synonym lists also include more unusual words and phrases, including dialectal expressions and many idioms. Synonyms are clearly labelled to show whether an expression is, for example, British, American, or Australian, literary or technical, colloquial, old-fashioned, or slang. If a headword has more than one sense, its synonyms are broken into groups, and each sense group is illustrated by an example sentence so that users can be sure that they are making selections from the right list of alternatives. In addition, each synonym listed which also appears as a headword elsewhere in the thesaurus is marked by a cross-reference symbol so users can look at a further range of synonyms and related words.