The relation between similarity and dissimilarity of meaning and similarity of context wasanalyzed for synonymous nouns. New semantic similarity and dissimilarity rating tests with anempirically determined series of linguistic anchors and conventional, arbitrarily anchored semanticsimilarity ratings were compared. Contextual similarity was elicited by a sorting test based onsubstitution and yielding d-primes. The study found reliable correlations between the d-primes andthe different ratings for semantic similarity and dissimilarity of the synonymous nouns across awide continuum of meaning. The data strongly supported a contextual hypothesis of meaning. Thedata endorsed the claim that people abstract a contextual representation from experiencing themultiple natural linguistic contexts of a word. Semantic similarity and dissimilarity rating formatswith an empirically chosen series of linguistic anchors and a sorting test of contextual similarityyielded stronger support for a contextual hypothesis than did alternative methods of elicitinglexical and contextual similarity.