Synonyms are words or phrases with a similar meaning. Perceptive Search allows you to collate words into a ring of similar meanings, and return results for all meanings by searching for a single word. For example, you can configure synonym rings so that when you search for 'coffee', you also get results that contain 'espresso', 'cappuccino' and 'mocha'. All the words in a ring will be retrieved in a synonym search. This is a useful way to expand a search into multiple meanings, without having to list of all the possible words in your search.
You can include a single word in more than one Synonym Ring. For example:
If you perform a search on car, Perceptive Search will expand both rings and search for all 10 terms.
Whether synonyms are automatically expanded in your queries depends on the Options you have set. Alternatively, you can control synonym expansion in your queries by using special symbols .
For more information about creating Synonym Rings, see Creating Synonym Rings and Synonym Modifiers.