The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in near-synonymy. In particular, recent distributional corpus-based approaches used for semantic analysis have successfully uncovered subtle distinctions in meaning between near-synonyms. However, most studies have dealt with the semantic structure of sets of near-synonyms from a synchronic perspective, while their diachronic evolution generally has been neglected. Against this backdrop, the aim of this book is to examine five adjectival near-synonyms in the history of American English from the understudied semantic domain of SMELL: fragrant,...