Antonym

Encyclopedia : A : AN : ANT : Antonym

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Antonyms, from the Greek anti ("opposite") and onoma ("name") are word pairs that are opposite in meaning, such as hot and cold, obese and skinny, and up and down. Words may have different antonyms, depending on the meaning. Both long and tall are antonyms of short. Antonyms are of three types:

• Gradable antonyms are two ends of the spectrum (slow and fast) but can have variations.
• Complementary antonyms are pairs that express absolute opposites, like mortal and immortal.
• Relational antonyms are pairs in which one describes a relationship between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects are reversed, such as parent and child, teacher and student, or buy and sell.

Although the word antonym was only coined by philologists in the 19th century, such relationships are a fundamental part of a language, in contrast to synonyms, which are a result of history and drawing of fine distinctions, or homonyms, which are mostly etymological accidents or coincidences.

A few words with two antonymous meanings may also be designated contronyms:

• enjoin (to prohibit; to order)
• fast (moving quickly; fixed firmly in place)
• cleave (to split; to adhere)

Languages often have ways of creating antonyms as an easy extension of lexicon. An example is the English prefixes in- and un-. Unreal is the antonym of real and indocile is of docile.

Some planned languages abundantly use such devices to reduce vocabulary multiplication. Esperanto has mal- (compare bona = "good" and malbona = "bad"), Damin has kuri- (tjitjuu "small", kuritjitjuu "large") and Newspeak has un- (as in ungood, "bad").

See also

• -onym
• Synonym
• Thesaurus

External links

• [Free Online English Thesaurus and Dictionary.] Free Online English Thesaurus and dictionary containing synonyms, related Words, antonyms, definitions, idioms, words and terms using Merriam Websters Thesarus, Wordnet Reference and Roget's Thesaurus Definitions.
• [Thesaurus.com] - also provides for antonyms.

 

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