Contronyms List
A contronym or antagonym is defined as a word which is in itself its own antonym. They are special cases of homographs, different words which share the same spelling. Rinkworks has a long list of them, some highlights of which I will share here with you:
- apology - admission of fault in what you think, say, or do; formal defense of what you think, say, or do
- dust - add fine particles, remove fine particles
- oversight - error, care
- pitted - with the pit in, with the pit removed
- rent - buy use of, sell use of
- table - propose (in the United Kingdom), set aside (in the United States)
There are doubtlessly many many more out there, so leave tons of comments for us in the hopes of acquiring more of these beautiful words!
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is tagged with rinkworks, contronym, antonym, apology, particles, oversight, admission, spelling, united kingdom, united states. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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Fresh, related resources:
- Contronyms
One of my interests on StumbleUpon is linguistics, and through this I found out about contronyms; they're kind of like weird versions of homographs that happen to be their own antonym. Examples... dollop - a large amount, a small amount ... - Janus Words & Contronyms
He didn't get the article's deeper meaning, as he had only scanned it. vs. She had a detailed view of the image, as she had used a machine to scan it. (For a longer list of contronyms, see here and here.) - Contronyms and Antagonyms
A list of words that are their own antonyms. - contronyms
Liberty-loving logophiles should check out this list of contronyms (via LRC) and also this followup on the LRC blog, by Anthony Gregory. - Political Contronyms
Lew links to a great list of contronyms. My friend Scott Garner joked that "free state" is one too. I thought that was just an oxymoron at first, but now figure it could refer either to a polity where the...