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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.
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.
Homophones (literally "same sound") are usually defined as words that share the same pronunciation, regardless of how they are spelled. [ note 2 ] If they are spelled the same then they are also homographs (and homonyms); if they are spelled differently then they are also heterographs (literally "different writing").
In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". [1] [2] Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. [3] Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional.
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").
That is to say, when an object moves from point A to point B, a change is created, while the underlying law remains the same. Thus, a unity of opposites is present in the universe simultaneously containing difference and sameness. An aphorism of Heraclitus illustrates the idea as follows: The road up and the road down are the same thing.
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 ...
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 ...