Sharepoint online and synonyms

[simoneuro]

Using Sharepoint on line. I have defined lots of synonyms (lots of common abbreviations) in the Term Store and they work great when tagging documents in a library. If I use a synonym for a term in a search of a document library then no documents are returned but if I used the term lots are. Have I completely misunderstood how synonyms work in Search. Sorry Im a newbie.

[#2]

In SharePoint Online, the synonyms won't work directly for Search results. For that you would need to use Thesaurus but it worked only in SharePoint on prem environments and it doesn't work in SharePoint Online.
As a workaround, you can use Search Query Rules. Following post might point you in the correct direction.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/Azure/en-US/dba144da-d285-40c5-9074-43f80c6c5e44/thesaur...

[#3]

@DhirenMehtaMSFT 

This is unbelievable. As we already have synonyms, which are of great help for people adding e.g. metawords to images but do not know the exact word (but know a "nickname") - that list should be doubled as Search Query-Rules (so that synonyms could be also used to find the images), instead of synonyms being used automatically on search or even updating  search query-rules automatically 

Our system has hundreds of metawords and many of them have multiple synonyms - metaword list is updated every now and then, and synonyms also separately updated. 

Impossible task to keep the query-rules in-line :<