Paronyms

Paronyms are words close in sound and morphemic structure but different (wholly or partly) in meaning ("imagination — notion," "public — civic," "spectacular — effective"). The partial phonetic similarity of paronyms combined with a difference in meaning causes their erroneous confusion in speech, and so paronymy is an important problem of the culture of language, requiring careful discrimination of shades of meaning. At the same time, in literature the deliberate bringing-together of paronyms becomes a stylistic device — paronomasia, which builds a sound-sense play on their consonance and intensifies the utterance. Paronyms often share a common root, which determines their formal similarity. The study of paronymy belongs to lexicology, stylistics and the culture of language; the practical discrimination of paronyms is presented in special dictionaries of paronyms.