synonym ring

English

Noun

synonym ring (plural synonym rings)

1. (information science, metadata) Synonym of synset
   • 1982, F. N. Teskey, Principles of Text Processing:

     A synonym ring is a set of words or phrases (which are regarded as synonymous). A thesaurus is a set of trees whose nodes are synonym rings.

   • 1985, Library Science with a Slant to Documentation:

     Each term in a synonym ring is equally likely to occur in any relevant article and so it is necessary to search for them all rather than one preferred term.

   • 2002, Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 178:

     A synonym ring (see Figure 9-2) connects a set of words that are defined as equivalent for the purposes of retrieval. In practice, these words are often not true synonyms.