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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 ...
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1] [2] enantionymy (enantio-means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
The road up and the road down are the same thing. (Hippolytus, Refutations 9.10.3) This is an example of a compresent unity of opposites. For, at the same time, this slanted road has the opposite qualities of ascent and descent.
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.
Anaphora – a succession of sentences beginning with the same word or group of words. Anastrophe – inversion of the natural word order. Anecdote – a brief narrative describing an interesting or amusing event. Antanaclasis – a figure of speech involving a pun, consisting of the repeated use of the same word, each time with different meanings.
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.
An antithesis must always contain two ideas within one statement. The ideas may not be structurally opposite, but they serve to be functionally opposite when comparing two ideas for emphasis. [4] According to Aristotle, the use of an antithesis makes the audience better understand the point the speaker is trying to make. Further explained, the ...
The longest single-word palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is the 12-letter onomatopoeic word tattarrattat, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) for a knock on the door. [ 35 ] [ 36 ] [ 37 ] The Guinness Book of Records gives the title to the 11-letter detartrated , the preterite and past participle of detartrate , a chemical term ...