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ACT® · Reading — Craft and Structure: Word Meanings and Word Choice

Connotation Versus Denotation

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Watch it explained

  1. How it worksHow does connotation sit as a charge layered on top of a word's plain definition?
  2. Worked exampleShow me ranking slender, thin, skinny and gaunt on one axis from warm to cold.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't a thesaurus synonym safe to swap into an author's sentence?

Check yourself

Your turneasy1 of 3
Informational passage: The biography describes the industrialist as thrifty, and cites the 25 years he wore the same overcoat and the 63 percent of profits he kept in reserve rather than distributing. A rival paper, reporting those same two facts in 1910, called him stingy. Neither account disputes the other's figures. Both were written within a year of his death, and both quote the same ledger. The two words denote one behaviour and charge it differently, and a reader who notices only the facts will come away thinking the writers disagreed about what the man did. The difference between thrifty and stingy in the passage is best described as a difference in:

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