Help > Authoring > Fundamental Tasks > Using the Thesaurus
  
Using the Thesaurus
Use the thesaurus to find definitions, synonyms, or antonyms for selected words or phrases.
To look up a word in your document:
1. To look up a single word, place your cursor in the word you wish to look up or highlight the entire word.
Choose Tools > Thesaurus from the menu bar. The Thesaurus dialog box opens. The highlighted word appears in Looked up:.
2. Review the definition. You may view lists of synonyms, near-synonyms, near-antonyms, antonyms, and analogous terms by clicking Synonym, Related, Contrast, Antonym, and Compare, respectively.
3. Review the definitions and related words for any word listed in the dialog box by highlighting it, then clicking Look Up.
4. You can change the word in Replace With: any time by simply typing over or editing the word as it appears in the Replace With: box.
5. To replace the highlighted word in your document with the word in the Replace With: box, simply click Replace.
Checking Multiple Languages in the Same Document
Arbortext Editor enables you to use the thesaurus for multiple languages in the same document. The default language is determined by the language dictionary selected in the Spelling category of the Preferences dialog box. However, you can set a language attribute on individual tags to have them checked using the dictionary for a specific language. The language attribute for a document is determined in the following way:
If the document has an associated Arbortext Styler.style file, the language attribute of the one designated in that stylesheet.
Otherwise, the attribute is the one designated in the document type configuration (.dcf) file for the document’s document type.
Otherwise, the attribute is xml:lang for XML documents and lang for SGML documents.
If no language attribute is set on a tag, then the value is inherited from the closest ancestor that sets the language. If no language is set anywhere in the tag’s ancestors, then the preference language is used in all cases.
When you set the language attribute to a specific language code (for example, xml:lang=”fr”), then the thesaurus uses the language dictionary for the designated language to check the content of that tag. If a tag specifies a language that is not supported, then that tag’s content is not spell checked. Also, a word with characters not expected in the current language (such as a Thai or Chinese word in an English paragraph) is ignored and will not be checked.
Refer to Supported authoring languages for a list of supported languages and language codes.