Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that fill in and fill out are low similarity synonyms. With respect to the Movie Corpus, it is worth noting that fill in was always preferable to fill out in the movies of six countries from the 1930s to the 1970s, whereas fill out was preferable to fill in from the 1980s to the 2010s. With respect to the COCA, it is significant to note that there is a high degree of similarity between fill in and fill out in the blog genre, whereas there is no similarity between them in the other genres (7 genres). Simply put, fill in is 12.5% the same as fill out. A further point to note is that fill in is the nearest to fill out in the blog genre. Quite interestingly, the COCA clearly shows that fill in gaps and fill out forms are the most preferable ones (61 tokens vs. 96 tokens) for Americans. When it comes to the collocations of fill in and fill out, 1.81% of fifty five nouns are the collocation of both fill in and fill out. This in turn suggests that fill in and fill out are low similarity synonyms.