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Opposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or, in terms of a scale, is distant from a related word. Some words lack a lexical opposite due to an accidental gap in the language's lexicon. For instance, while the word "devout" has no direct opposite, it is easy to conceptualize a scale of devoutness ...
The original edition had 15,000 words and each successive edition has been larger, [3] with the most recent edition (the eighth) containing 443,000 words. [6] The book is updated regularly and each edition is heralded as a gauge to contemporary terms; but each edition keeps true to the original classifications established by Roget. [2]
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.
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.
The site cross-references the contents of dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the Collins English Dictionary; encyclopedias such as the Columbia Encyclopedia, the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, the Hutchinson Encyclopedia (subscription), and Wikipedia; book publishers such as McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins, as well as the Acronym Finder ...
Taxonymy (not to be confused with, though related to, taxonomy) is a sub-variety of hyponymy.Within the structure of a taxonomic lexical hierarchy, two types of hyponymic relation may be distinguished: the first—exemplified in "An X is a Y"—corresponds to so-called "simple" hyponymy; the second—that which is exemplified in "An X is a kind/type of Y"—is more discriminating, and ...
For example, a word can have several word senses. [3] Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. [3] Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as bear the animal, and the verb bear); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy ...
In 1864, Merriam published a greatly expanded edition, which was the first version to change Webster's text, largely overhauling his work yet retaining many of his definitions and the title, An American Dictionary. In 1884, the edition contained 118,000 words, "3000 more than any other English dictionary".