Synonymic substitution¶

synonymic_substitution · word · catalogued

A rewriting in which every substantive word is replaced by a synonym, repeated until the source is unrecognisable.

Provenance¶

Source: Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (1981)
Attribution: reference — attested in a standard reference rather than traced to an origin
Checkability: source — decidable against the source text it was made from
Attested: codified — formulated as a rule by a tradition rather than declared by an author

Details¶

Kind: both
Languages: en
Requires: tokens, lexicon.synonyms
Deterministic: no

Notes¶

Blocked, and a larger thesaurus will not unblock it. WordNet synonymy is synset co-membership: of twelve substitutions a writer would naturally make, five are co-members, and only four of eleven content words in plain prose have any synonym at all. "Every substantive word replaced by a synonym" is not satisfiable by ordinary text.

Prompt hint¶

Replace each meaningful word with a synonym, then do it again to the result.