Synonymy One important component of word meaning is the relationship between word senses. For example when one word has a sense whose meaning is identical to a sense of another word, or nearly identical, we say the two senses of those two words are synonyms. Synonyms include such pairs as couch/sofa vomit/throw up filbert/hazelnut car/automobile A more formal definition of synonymy (between words rather than senses) is that two words are synonymous if they are substitutable for one another in any sentence without changing the truth conditions of the sentence, the situations in which the sentence would be true. We often say in this case that the two words have the same propositional meaning.