Works

A lively two-volume guide to choosing exact and elegant words in polite discourse, it blends scholarship with anecdote and was dedicated to Dr Johnson’s memory.

Reception was mixed: praised for its wit and usefulness by many reviewers, yet criticised in some quarters for occasional inaccuracies and for a style thought too conversational for serious philology.

My Synonymes have been review'd at last—the Critics are all civil for ought I see, & nearly just, except when they say that Johnson left some Fragments of A Work upon Synonymy—of which God knows I never heard till now one Syllable, nor had he and in all the time we lived together, any Conversation upon the Subject.

Hester Thrale. Denbigh, 2 January 1795.