A corpus-based study of English synonyms: resident, inhabitant, and population

This corpus-based study investigates the distinctions between the near-synonymous nouns resident, inhabitant, and population in terms of frequency,formality, semantic preference, and collocations. Based on evidence from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study examines the distribution of three near-synonymous nouns across genres, their lexical patterns through collocationalpartners, and the semantic fields in which they typically occur. The findings reveal that population is the most frequent term, particularly dominant in institutional andacademic genres, where it functions as an abstract, collective, and statistical noun. Resident occurs with moderate frequency and is widely used in semi-formal to formal contexts, especially in legal, civic, and medical discourse. Inhabitant is the leastfrequent of the three and appears primarily in formal, literary, or descriptive contexts—often relating to ethnicity, origin, or fictional settings. Collocational analysis shows that each word tends to pair with distinct sets of adjective and noun collocates, drawn from different semantic fields such as legality, continuity, geography, or vulnerability. Thesepatterns suggest that while the three terms share a core denotative meaning, their usage is highly context-dependent and influenced by genre and register.