From Wikipedia: Verbal context refers to surrounding text or talk of an expression (word, sentence, conversational turn, speech act, etc.). The idea is that verbal context influences the way we understand the expression. Hence the norm not to cite people out of context. Since much contemporary linguistics takes texts, discourses or conversations as its object of analysis, the modern study of verbal context takes place in terms of the analysis of discourse structures and their mutual relationships, for instance the coherence relation between sentences. ~~~ Traditionally, in sociolinguistics, social contexts were defined in terms of objective social variables, such as those of class, gender or race. More recently, social contexts tend to be defined in terms of the social identity being construed and displayed in text and talk by language users. ~~~ Synonyms are different words with almost identical or similar meanings. 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 syn (???) ("with") and onoma (?????) ("name"). The words car and automobile are synonyms. Similarly, if we talk about a long time or an extended time, long and extended become synonyms. In the figurative sense, two words are often said to be synonymous if they have the same connotation: "a widespread impression that... Hollywood was synonymous with immorality" (Doris Kearns Goodwin) ~~~ Synonyms can be any part of speech (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or prepositions), as long as both members of the pair are the same part of speech. ~~~ In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to the fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not the other pair member.