A corpus-based study of English synonyms: awful and terrible

This corpus-based study aims to examine the differences and similarities between the synonymous adjectives awful and terrible in terms of meaning, degree of formality, and collocations. The data for this research were collected from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (online version) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). A total of 200 concordance lines for each adjective were analyzed to explore their usage in real-life contexts.The results revealed that although awful and terrible share similar core meanings, they differ in use across various genres and situations. Although both adjectives are used more often in informal contexts, as evidenced by their high frequencies in TV/movies subtitles, spoken texts, and fiction, and their low frequency in academic texts, the adjective terrible appears more frequently than awful across all settings, suggesting broader usage and greater acceptability. In terms of collocation, each adjective has a unique set of noun collocates and themes, although some overlap exists. Overall, the findings confirm that awful and terrible are not fully interchangeable. Understanding their distinct usage patterns can support more accurate and natural word choice. This study highlights the value of corpus-based analysis in vocabulary learning and suggests its usefulness in teaching synonyms effectively.