Synonymous vs Tantamount - What's the difference?

synonymous | tantamount |

As adjectives the difference between synonymous and tantamount

is that synonymous is having a similar meaning while tantamount is equivalent in meaning or effect.

As a verb tantamount is

(obsolete) to amount to as much; to be equivalent.

As a noun tantamount is

(obsolete) something which has the same value or amount (as something else).

synonymous

English

Adjective

(-)

having a similar meaning

of, or being a synonym

(genetics, of a SNP) Such that both its forms yield the same sequenced protein.

Antonyms

* antonymous * nonsynonymous * (genetics) nonsynonymous

Derived terms

* synonym * synonymity

tantamount

English

Verb

(en verb)

(obsolete) To amount to as much; to be equivalent.

(Jeremy Taylor)

Noun

(en noun)

(obsolete) Something which has the same value or amount (as something else).

* 1977 , the Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett , page 42:

For end thereof, not despondency but madness : for when Cossey understood that Hobday had called his wife a tantamount , he waited for him outside, and gave him what he called a pair of clippers over the ear.

Adjective

(en adjective)

Equivalent in meaning or effect.

It's tantamount to fraud.

In this view, disagreement and treason are tantamount .

* De Quincey

the certainty that delay, under these circumstances, was tantamount to ruin

* 1981 , Del Martin, Battered Wives (page 90)

expecting the woman to take her attacker into physical custody is tantamount to preventing the arrest. If she could handle him, she probably would not need to call the police in the first place.

Usage notes

Tantamount is used almost exclusively in the phrase tantamount to , but may also be used by itself.

Quotations

* 2003': In Bosnia, as in Rwanda, however, passive neutrality was '''tantamount to complicity with the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" and mass murder — ''The New Yorker, 3 March 2003