[Lexicog] missing word

[John Roberts]

Wayne Leman said:

> The missing word should fit in the following sentence:
>
> "The ______ of symptoms leads us to believe that one diagnosis is most
> likely out of the several possible diagnoses."


When I read this the first expression that sprang to my mind was "range of
symptoms". A close second was "set of symptoms", which you had rejected as
not what you wanted. I noted that my Chambers dictionary of synonyms and
antonyms does not list "set" as a synonym of "range" and in my Collins
COBUILD dictionary "set" is given as the hypernym of "range". Other
possibilities that I could think of were "cluster of symptoms" and
"constellation of symptoms" - but I decided I would be a lot less likely to
use such words in this context.

Then I looked at what others had suggested.

I was teaching how to identify synonyms in one of my courses one time and
the example I was using was "range". However, I found that the Americans had
a different range of synonyms for "range" than I had as a speaker of British
English. So what comes to mind for this example may also depend on where you
learned your English.

John Roberts




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