According to Merriam-Webster:
penetrate — to pass into or through
compenetrate — to penetrate throughout
What is the difference between the two? Are they synonymous?
Learn English – Difference between “penetrate” and “compenetrate”
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maybe is an adverb, meaning perhaps or possibly.
may be is a verbal construction, formed of the modal verb may and the verb be, which can be used in sentences like “he may be in the office today”. Note that, if you were to rewrite this sentence with maybe, you would say “maybe he is in the office today”. Because maybe is an adverb, you need to add a verb to the sentence (is, a form of be, in that case).
Under the entry for laughable in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003), a note on synonyms has this side-by-side comparison of ludicrous and ridiculous:
LUDICROUS suggests absurdity that excites both laughter and scorn {a thriller with a ludicrous plot}. RIDICULOUS suggests extreme absurdity, foolishness, or contemptibility {a ridiculous display of anger}.
So the distinction between ludicrous and ridiculous, MW seems to assert, comes down to the difference between absurdity that may provoke scorn and absurdity that may provoke contempt, within a larger context in which both words involve "provoking laughter or mirth." In my experience, ludicrous tends to be used most often to describe a situation that has elements of farcical incongruity, whereas ridiculous is a more common, all-purpose term whose meaning amounts to "not to be taken seriously."
As the following Ngram chart for ludicrous (red line) versus ridiculous (blue line) for the period 1700–2005 indicates, the frequency of use of both terms in Google Books' database of published works has decreased slightly but fairly steadily for most of the past century, and the difference in frequency between the two words has remained remarkably consistent:
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Best Answer
I don't think they're synonymous, no; one suggests a more complete level of penetration than the other. Judging by the definitions, I'd guess that you'd penetrate through, but you'd compentrate throughout.
I initially wondered if compenetrate is a word used in a specialized field (perhaps something scientific, e.g., to describe how an electrical field might compenetrate throughout a substance), so I did a search on Google books.
What I found was rather instructive. First, the word is indeed rather rare (only 75,000 hits, versus more than 12 million for penetrate). More significantly, it appears to be a word used almost exclusively in the realm of philosophy – a great preponderance of the cited references were scholarly works in philosophy or religion, such as:
As I perused through the results, a few quotes kept appearing over and over again, such as:
This quote, along with some others that were oft-repeated, was attributed to turn-of-the-century philosopher William James. I saw the word appear in so many references to his writings that I began to wonder if he coined the term, but the OED refuted that theory:
My spellchecker doesn't like the word. There's probably very little need to use the term, outside of esoteric philosophical writings discussing various levels of consciousness and subconsciousness, parallel universes, and the like. I can think of very few everyday uses for the word, although I suppose it might be apt if you were trying to describe the compenetrating Vulcan mind meld that Mr. Spock gave to Dr. McCoy.