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An antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings.
Converses can be understood as a pair of words where one word implies a relationship between two objects, while the other implies the existence of the same relationship when the objects are reversed. [3] Converses are sometimes referred to as complementary antonyms because an "either/or" relationship is present between them. One exists only ...
Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings. Gradable antonyms. A gradable antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings where the two meanings lie on a continuous spectrum.
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.
Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker and intended to be understood as such by the listener. In a more extended sense, the term "oxymoron" has also been applied to inadvertent or incidental contradictions, as in the case of "dead metaphors" ("barely clothed" or "terribly good").
Some pairs of contronyms are true homographs, i.e., distinct words with different etymologies which happen to have the same form. [7] For instance cleave "separate" is from Old English clēofan, while cleave "adhere" is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced differently.
Thus, the relations between verbs are not as agreed-upon as that of nouns. Another attribute of verb synset relations is that there are also ordered into verb pairs. In these pairs, one verb necessarily entails the other in the way that massacre entails kill, and know entails believe. [2]
The database contains 155,327 words organized in 175,979 synsets for a total of 207,016 word-sense pairs; in compressed form, it is about 12 megabytes in size. [3] It includes the lexical categories nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs but ignores prepositions, determiners and other function words.