Fitzhenry and Whiteside Canadian Thesaurus

The book is more than 1,200 pages and boasts: more than 30,000 entries, 500,000 synonyms, 70,000 antonyms, and is jam-packed with Canadian references from A to Z."

Look up the word "district," for instance, and in addition to the usual synonyms and antonyms, the reader will find references to well-known "neighbourhood" districts such as "Market Square" in Saint John, Montreal's " Balconville," Toronto's "Cabbagetown" and" The Danforth," "The Forks" in Winnipeg, and Vancouver's "Gastown," among others.

Under "dessert" it's difficult to imagine another reference book wherein "baked Alaska" and "crA]me caramel" sit side-by-side with "blueberry grunt, jambuster, Joe Louis," and "Nanaimo bar."

The listing for "flower" provides the reader with the name of the official flower of each Canadian province and territory. Look up "motto, tree," or "bird," and the provincial and territorial mottos, trees, and birds are there as well.

And what thesaurus could call itself even remotely Canadian without at least a baker's dozen of synonyms for "donut"?

"Hudson Bay Coat, McLaughlin Buick, Bricklin, Zamboni"? Yes, they_re in here. So too are " fiddlehead," "Herring Choker," and "Digby Chicken."

You'll have to find them.

Other points on the making of the Fitzhenry and Whiteside "Canadian Thesaurus": Fitzhenry and Whiteside "Canadian Thesaurus" is the first Canadian reference book of its kind built - not from an existing database - but totally from scratch over a period of close to 12 years. At more than 1200 pages, the book contains over 30,000 individual entries. The book has been exhaustively cross-referenced against a wide range of Canadian language reference works including the Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island dictionaries and (more recently) the new Canadian Oxford, to name a few. The book supplies the reader with more than 500,000 synonyms, plus some 70,000 antonyms and more shades of meaning than any of its competitors. All synonyms are clearly labeled as to parts of speech, designated as formal or non-formal, and ranked by popularity of use. Additionally, this thesaurus highlights 'kinds of' and 'groups of' words related to the initial key word, a feature seldom found in similar reference works. This book is richly geographic in its attribution of origins. Whether the word in question was born in France, Germany, England, the Maritimes, the Canadian Prairies, or the Pacific coast, the reader will know. As befits its title, the "Canadian Thesaurus" is jam-packed with Canadian references from A to Z. The book is uniquely rich with references to Canada's First Peoples. The Editorial Director of this project - Dr. J.K. Chambers, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto - has served as Fitzhenry and Whiteside's editorial consultant on the ongoing Canadianization of the Funk and Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary since 1980. Recently, he served as Canadian English Editorial Advisor on the new Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998), and wrote the Preface to that best-selling volume. Dr. Chambers is internationally recognized as a pre-eminent authority on Canadian English and English language usage in Canada.