Okay, here’s the situation:

You read a text – a student essay, a blog post, a media article – and can’t get rid of deja vu. The text sounds as if you’ve seen it before. Plagiarism checkers don’t detect anything wrong but the catch is definitely somewhere around here. Savvy educators and editors know this catch. Synonymized plagiarism is its name.

One of the most commonly used ways to hide duplications in writings, synonymized plagiarism modifies them so that search engines and plagiarism detection software consider them original. What can be easier, indeed? You take a sentence, replace all parts of speech there with closely related words – Ta da! No copy paste, no copyright infringement, no penalties for stealing ideas and content from others.
We can almost hear you thinking:

“If all is that simple, why shall I spend time and money on plagiarism detections unable to discover duplications?”

Don’t get rattled!

First, not all plagiarism checkers work the same way. (Spoiler alert: ours recognizes synonyms.) Second, there are some tricks to help you discover this type of plagiarism in texts; in this article, we are going to share them. But first things first:

What’s So Tricky About Synonymization?

The more advanced technologies appear to beat plagiarism, the more loopholes cheaters try to find to circumvent restrictions. Obviously, it’s a nightmare for students to be accused of plagiarism as consequences might be way more serious than poor grades. Plagiarism is one of the despicable acts of academia, and educational institutions move heaven and earth to defeat this phenomenon. But not by academics alone.

Plagiarism is an issue for anybody hiring people to do writing. SEO specialists and content marketers ask freelance authors to provide blog posts, sales copies, and any other content types to share with the audience. All these people want to be sure that contractors submit 100% original writings that don’t infringe any copyright and won’t get penalties from search engines for duplications.
After all, who wants to pay authors for poor paraphrasing?
And money is not the only point of concern here:
  • It’s wrong to steal content.
  • It’s embarrassing.
  • Consequences are far from pleasant.
So what’s the solution?

Use advanced plagiarism checkers and consider your human powers to detect this plagiarism type instantly.

What You Can Do Yourself to Detect Synonymization

“To exist, or not to exist? That is the query.”

Please, don’t say that you can’t recognize synonymization here! Unlike search engines and most free plagiarism checkers, a human brain reveals such duplications because it doesn’t think in terms of letters. While it can be an original sentence to a computer, a man of education will see a reference to Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be? That is the question” here.
It’s the moment when synonymization fails. When writing, you craft texts by choosing particular words to convey the meaning, style, and connotation. Yes, you know that “boat” and “ship” can be synonyms but you understand they are not interchangeable because of different images they carry. It’s about writing professionalism, text readability, and its flow. If missing the nuances in a language, we writers turn our works into nothing but a bunch of unrelated words.
So, if a plagiarism checker doesn’t find duplications but you feel that something is wrong with the text you’re reading, here’s how you can detect its problematic spots:
  • It doesn’t sound natural: weird grammar constructions, low readability, word choice fails the context.
  • It closely echoes texts you’ve already read.
  • It doesn’t fit the writing style of a given author: their other works sound different.
  • It has too many stop words, wish-wash, redundant adverbs and adjectives, passive voice, parentheses, and other lexical items with no meaning.
  • It doesn’t sound like a logical narration: sentences or paragraphs seem unrelated to each other.

plagiarism synonym

How PlagiarismCheck.org Detects Synonymization

As any other plagiarism checkers, our service will go through your content to make sure it’s original. But unlike most of free checkers, ours is complemented with improved algorithms to detect advanced plagiarism types, one of which is  synonymization. PlagiarismCheck.org scans the text for similarities and recognizes words replaced with synonyms, flagging them as plagiarism, which impacts the final similarity score. You will get a detailed report where the problematic parts of the text are highlighted, and links to the sources with the matching content are provided, so you can compare and analyze the texts to make your own conclusions.

How plagiarism detectors work

Despite doing wonders to facilitate the work process, plagiarism detection is no magic wand. The tool relies on thought-out algorithms and cutting-edge technologies, guaranteeing customers a precise and easy solution.

  1. Each tool has a database. Its vastness depends on the product: some checkers search only online, while others have access to specific repositories. PlagiarismCheck.org, for example, searches all the resources available online, including freshly published or deleted content. Besides, the detector has access to some closed databases that are unavailable for free, ensuring more accurate results. Moreover, the customers can upload their own texts for comparison–for example, teachers can add their institution’s repository to prevent students from copying from each other.
  2. Empowered by sophisticated algorithms, the tool compares the text submitted for the check to all the content from its database. It flags the matches between the writing and the database and gives a potential plagiarism percentage based on the similarities. The depth of analysis depends on the tool. PlagiarismCheck.org, for instance, catches not only verbatim copying but can trace poor paraphrasing, synonymization, sentence restructuring, hidden symbols, and other tricky cheating attempts.
  3. The report reflects the number and character of matches between the text and the database. It can provide other details: for example, PlagiarismCheck.org generates a downloadable report where the user can see all the sources where the similarities have been caught and analyze them by comparing the paper to the source text.

Unobvious facts about plagiarism checkers

  1. Modern similarity detectors can provide comprehensive text analysis. PlagiarismCheck.org, for instance, also assists with punctuation and grammar and includes a Chat GPT checker, Citation Generator, and Authorship Authentification tool.
  2. The checker detects similarities that are allegedly plagiarism. However, it is for the customer to make the final conclusion: sometimes copying is accidental, or the matching parts contain information that the author needs to keep unchanged. It is handy that the detector flags the matching parts of the text so one can analyze it and make a verdict.
  3. Students can use the plagiarism checker to learn from their mistakes even before the teacher’s feedback. By scanning the text for similarities, they can avoid unintentional plagiarism, master proper paraphrasing and citation, and improve writing skills.
  4. Top-notch plagiarism detectors can be fully integrated into the workflow. In particular, PlagiarismCheck.org can be used on popular Learning Management System platforms, as a browser extension or Google Docs add-on, or implemented into any environment through API.

In a Word…

Synonymization is the process of substituting words in sentences with lexical items of closely related meanings. When you learn a language or craft writing skills, it comes in handy: helps to enrich vocabulary, makes your texts more engaging, and allows to develop a writing style your audience will recognize and love. Yet, synonymization has a dark side too. It gives birth to a phenomenon known as synonymized plagiarism, a technique cheaters use to rewrite existed texts and represent them as own.
Software like PlagiarismCheck.org can recognize synonymized texts, even though this type of plagiarism is difficult to detect. Even when search engines don’t flag synonyms as duplications, it’s still a copyright infringement to use this tactic for writing original texts. To protect your works and avoid plagiarism, consider reliable tools to check writings before sharing them with your audience.
PlagiarismCheck.org protects integrity at all levels. Try our Chat GPT checker and similarities detection for free now!