A corpus-based study of English synonyms: famous, renowned and well-known

This corpus-based study aims to investigate the similarities and differences of the three adjective synonyms: famous, renowned, and well-known in terms of meanings, degree of formality, and collocations. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), Oxford Advanced American Online Dictionary (2010), and Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (2011) are used as primary sources of data collection. The findings of this study found that the adjective renowned is slightly different from the other two adjectives when comparing the cognitive and connotational meanings provided by both American English online dictionaries. In terms of degree of formality, famous, renowned, and well-known are commonly used in a formal context because of their lower frequency in spoken language. Moreover, well-known has a higher degree of formality compared to famous and renowned. To be more specific, famous is slightly less formal than renowned due to its lower frequency in academic texts. It is also found that these words usually collocate with nouns regarding people who have artistic ability. However, there are several types of semantic categories where noun collocates of famous, renowned, and well-known are differently shared. Additionally, there are certain contexts where these three adjectives cannot act as substitutes due to the differences of meanings, degree of formality, and collocations. Hence, this confirms that these three adjective words are near synonyms since they are not interchangeable in all contexts.