The study of synonymy and other forms of variation has long been neglected by terminologists, due to the importance given to an ideal biunivocal correspondence between terms and concepts. In the last few years, however, a change of attitude has taken place: various authors have begun to question this principle and focus their attention on the actual behaviour of synonyms and variants, which are often encompassed under the more general term “variation”. After a brief discussion of such an evolution, the paper aims to show the solutions adopted in a translation-oriented term bank (TERMit) in order to describe, as exhaustively as possible, the differences and peculiarities in the use of coexisting designations. The last section illustrates how the same approach can be applied to the description of specialised phraseological expressions and in particular of fixed formulae. These, too, may take a number of different forms, which can be described as full synonyms, partial synonyms, and variants.
