Endings: "Call off," "close down," "drop by," "lash out," "own up" and "take after" are among the entries in "The American Heritage Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs" (Houghton Mifflin, 480 pages, $19.95). The AHD editors have also published the third edition of "The American Heritage Dictionary of Abbreviations" (Houghton Mifflin, 294 pages, $6.95). The book's 20,000-plus entries come from sources such as classified ads, business memos, shortwave radio, and text messaging, and range from "ALLSA," for the Allergy Society of South Africa, to "ZRL," for "zero risk level." ... Oak Park-based Marion Street Press has issued a new breed of thesaurus with a snooty name: "The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words" (Marion Street Press, 460 pages, $29.95), by Peter Meltzer. The book aims to "offer interesting (rather than mundane) words as synonyms, and ... explain them so the reader would not be embarrassed by using the synonym incorrectly." The entry for "incontrovertible," for instance, suggests "apodictic," with a paragraph-long explanation of its precise meaning, and a recent example from a newspaper. While many alternatives will be too obscure for you to drop into dinner-party conversation ("perfervid" instead of "impassioned"? "antediluvian" instead of "outdated"?), one of the most distinctive features of the book is its use of proper names as synonyms, such as "Micawber" (a Dickens character) for "optimist," and "between Scylla and Charybdis" for "in a predicament." Marion Street Press, which specializes in writing guides, has also released "The Wrong Word Dictionary: 2,000 Most Commonly Confused Words" (Marion Street Press, 237 pages, $14.95).