Whois & Analysis for dictionary.com

Dictionary.com is an online dictionary whose domain was first registered on May 14, 1995.

The company was founded by Brian Kariger and Daniel Fierro as part of Lexico Publishing, which also started Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.

Semantics (from sēmantikos, "significant") is primarily the linguistic, and also philosophical, study of meaning—in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.

It focuses on the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for, their denotation.

In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning).

This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own.

A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed).

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.

By extension, the term "the etymology (of a word)" means the origin of the particular word.

A synonym is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language.

Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy.

The word comes from Ancient Greek sýn ("with") and ónoma ("name").

An example of synonyms are the words begin, start, commence, and initiate.

Words can be synonymous when meant in certain senses, even if they are not synonymous in all of their senses.

For example, if one talks about a long time or an extended time, long and extended are synonymous within that context.

Synonyms with exact meaning share a seme or denotational sememe, whereas those with inexactly similar meanings share a broader denotational or connotational sememe and thus overlap within a semantic field.

Some academics call the former type cognitive synonyms to distinguish them from the latter type, which they call near-synonyms.