An ingeniously handy guide to help you transform chew into masticate, rainy into pluvian—or antediluvian into plain old old.

Attorney James Snyder didn’t set out to write a book about words. But one day he looked up the word animadversion. The definition said it means the same thing as aspersion. He wasn’t quite sure what that meant, so he looked it up. It meant the same thing as slander. At last he was getting somewhere— and he stumbled upon an inconvenient truth about dictionaries: If you don’t know big words, they sometimes aren’t much help.

So Snyder started collecting what he calls one-word definitions—simple words for fancy ones, and fancy words for simple ones. So whether you’re a penster (writer) looking for the right palabra (word), or just a solecistic (ungrammatical) malingerer (faker) trying to gasconade (show off ) to your gormless (stupid) yokemates (co-workers), this handy and engaging reference presents the right word for any occasion.