Awesome? Zero-Cool!

I've been thinking lately that I really need to expand my vocabulary. There's one specific word that has prompted this thought: Awesome. As awesome as it is, it's one word, and I use it all the time, to describe everything. So I've decided to find some synonyms to replace it with, at least occasionally.

Google wasn't particularly helpful, in this instance. Typing in "define:awesome" yielded but two entries, one of which had something to do with flying and one where "awesome" was used in the definition of "amazing." Google wasn't entirely useless, however. When I accidentally type "definition:awesome" instead of "define:awesome" it produced this result:

This more or less vindicated the entire enterprise. (Read the second line of the Tip carefully.)

With that chapter of my search concluded, I returned to an old favorite, Thesaurus.com. I've used this site many, many times, never for anything remotely useful. In this case, entering "awesome" into the search field produced the following list:

alarming, astonishing, awe-inspring, awful, beautiful, breathtaking, daunting, dreadful, exalted, far out, fearful, fearsome, formidable, frantic, frightening, grand, hairy*, horrible, horrifying, imposing, impressive, intimidating, magnificent, majestic, mind-blowing*, moving, nervous, overwhelming, shocking, striking, stunning, stupefying, terrible, terrifying, wondrous, zero-cool*

*Words that Thesaurus.com classifies as slang.

Some of these words are obviously useless, for various reasons. They fail the yell aloud test, they fail the Batman test. In fact, none of them really approach the Awesome inherent in the word Awesome.

Except zero-cool. A word I've never heard before. It's apparently the name of a movie, the title of an early Michael Crichton book, and the nickname of a character in the movie Hackers. It's essentially a variation on the word and concept "cool." (What's cooler than being cool?)

And I may actually consider using it. Because "z" is an awesome letter.