Read through the steps below to familiarize yourself with the thesaurus before starting the hands-on activity at the bottom of the page.

Tool Menu

You can access Word's thesaurus from the Tools menu, which gives you more options:

1. First, to practice finding synonyms in the word processor, open the word document file (Practice). Save as "thesaurus" in your desktop folder. Open in word.
2. First select the word you would like to look up. For this exercise, choose (highlight) "district" from the second line of the description.
3. Open the Tools menu.
4. Select Language.
5. Select Thesaurus from the submenu. The thesaurus dialog box opens.
6. Select the correct meaning of the word, and the side box displays words that share the meaning you selected. In this case, select region. Note how the synonyms changed to reflect the meaning we were after.
7. Click on the replace button to change the word "district" to "region" in your document.

Synonyms

If you can't find a suitable replacement for your word, you can select one of the synonyms and click on Look Up for more options. Or, you can click on Cancel.

NOTE: If you start up the thesaurus without a word selected, you will get a blank dialogue box. You can then type in any word you want to search for.

Save the completed activity in both your desktop folder and your server folder