13 Responses for "One word, two opposing meanings"

1. Alexander February 22nd, 2012 at 11:41 am

   I took five years to raise this building, and five hours to raze it. (Don’t be unfair and say it doesn’t count because the spelling’s different!)

2. Jamie February 22nd, 2012 at 12:53 pm

   Cleave (together) and cleave (apart)?

3. Yerameyahu February 22nd, 2012 at 3:50 pm

   Love ‘em.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

4. Jack Windsor Lewis February 22nd, 2012 at 4:17 pm

   See Google’s article (one example is ‘fast’)

   An auto-antonym (sometimes spelled autantonym), or contranym (originally spelled contronym), is a word with a homograph (a word of the same spelling) that is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning). Variant names include antagonym, Janus word (after the Roman god), enantiodrome, self-antonym, antilogy, addad (Arabic, singular didd).[1] [2] It is a word with multiple meanings, one of which is defined as the reverse of one of its other meanings. This phenomenon is also called “enantionymy” or “antilogy.” (one example is ‘fast’)

5. Jake February 22nd, 2012 at 4:24 pm

   “Moot” has an interesting sort of self-antagonism in usage between its historical meaning as “open to debate”, and its (largely American) practical meaning as “irrelevant”.

6. Graham February 22nd, 2012 at 7:37 pm

   Jamie – good examples, but cleave and cleave are slightly different as they have different Old English ancestry. They come under Jack’s category of “contronym: a word with a homograph (a word of the same spelling) that is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning)”. Alexander – Raise and raze are certainy antonyms, but not quite contronyms. Westerly, however, is the ’same’ word whatever its meaning.

7. John Maidment February 27th, 2012 at 12:53 pm

   It has just struck me that “smoke” (vb) is an auto-antonym of sorts, because it can mean both give off smoke and take in smoke.

8. Alfred February 28th, 2012 at 6:30 am

   Does “enjoin” count? If you enjoin someone to do an act, you are ordering him to do it. If you enjoin someone from doing something, you are prohibiting the act. The latter example does require the preposition “from” and one may argue that it’s effectively a phrasal verb.

9. Graham February 28th, 2012 at 10:32 am

   Sanction is another of these words: When we sanction an action, we give it our blessing, but Europe is applying sanctions against the Syrian authorities at the moment, and this is forbidding certain actions.

10. Joe Kessler March 7th, 2012 at 4:26 pm

    There’s another good list of them here:

    http://www.rinkworks.com/words/contronyms.shtml

11. Paul Carley March 7th, 2012 at 11:47 pm

    How about the Polish word ‘zawód’, which means both ‘career’ and ‘disappointment’?

    Depending on your circumstances, those could be synonyms or antonyms.

12. dw March 8th, 2012 at 12:42 am

    If we’re bringing in other languages, then Hindi “kal” ( कल ) means both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”.

13. Wiseman March 13th, 2012 at 9:16 pm

    In Latin we’ve got “im-mūtātus”, which can mean both “changed” (with the prefix “in-” meaning a figurative motion) and “unchanged” (with “in-” in its negative sense).