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Oxymorons are words that communicate contradictions. An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction. As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox.
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.
Word British English meanings Meanings common to British and American English American English meanings daddy longlegs, daddy-long-legs crane fly: daddy long-legs spider: Opiliones: dead (of a cup, glass, bottle or cigarette) empty, finished with very, extremely ("dead good", "dead heavy", "dead rich") deceased
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.
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar, orthography, and word-use, especially between different English-speaking countries.
The modern English word evil (Old English yfel) and its cognates such as the German Übel and Dutch euvel are widely considered to come from a Proto-Germanic reconstructed form of *ubilaz, comparable to the Hittite huwapp-ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European form *wap-and suffixed zero-grade form *up-elo-.
When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings depending on context. For example, Spanish dichoso [ 4 ] originally meant "fortunate, blissful" as in tierra dichosa , "fortunate land", but it acquired the ironic and colloquial meaning of "infortunate, bothersome" as in ¡Dichosas moscas ...