And a broader definition of unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for a job out of frustration, fell to 7.6 percent. The jobless rate for African-Americans fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest on record, which we would count as “great.”

If anything, some of the thesaurus offerings don’t really do these numbers justice. But some aspects of the report would be fairly described as “solid,” “decent” or “benign,” such as the uptick in the ratio of the adult population that is employed to 60.4 percent, which only matches its recent high of earlier in the year.

Then there are other thesaurus synonyms for “good” that we don’t normally use in reference to employment numbers, but which are apropos this month. For example, “congruous,” in the sense that the various pieces of the report align with each other: Employers are creating more jobs, leading more people to work and fewer people to be unemployed, and leading wages to rise.

And the numbers are “propitious” and “agreeable” in that they affirm that the United States economy is in basically sound shape, displaying neither the slightest warning signs of recession nor any clear evidence of overheating and inflation risks.

Not all of the thesaurus words for “good” work quite so well in describing the May jobs numbers. For example, I’ve never tried to eat the 39-page report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I’m pretty sure “toothsome” and “palatable” are not adjectives I would use.