After doing some research I have decided that I will use tokens for my text adventure. This will make it very easy to handle synonyms.
It has also become obvious that I will be handling a lot more data than I have ever had to deal with before (rooms, items, monsters etc.) I wll need to research some better ways of doing this.

I am considering using an array to make a text based map with different numbers or letters standing for different things that can be in a space.