antonym

UK/ˈæn.təˌnɪm/US/ˈæn.təˌnɪm/

nounB1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — ant sits at #3,542leans written

Other forms: antonyms

An antonym is a word meaning the opposite of another word. The antonym of hot, list the antonyms, an exact antonym.

Few pairs are exact, since hot and cold sit on one scale while alive and dead admit nothing between them, and those are two different kinds of opposite. The word was built in French in the nineteenth century on the pattern of synonym.

Definitions of antonym

1nounantonymA word meaning the opposite of another word.B1
“The teacher asked us to find an antonym for each adjective, such as 'hot' for 'cold'.”

antonym is a word.

Where it comes from

French antonyme was formed in the nineteenth century on the pattern of synonyme, from Greek anti, against, plus onoma, a name.

Ancient Greek
ἀντωνυμία — pronoun
French
antonyme
English, today
antonym

From French antonyme (1840s and 1850s), which was modeled on earlier synonyme and influenced by the etymons of Ancient Greek ἀντωνυμία (“pronoun”); credit for popularization of the French loanword's naturalization into English is given principally to Charles John Smith and his 1867 book Synonyms and Antonyms: Or, Kindred Words and Their Opposites. Collected and Contrasted. by surface analysis, ant- + -onym.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Academic English

Practise this word

antonym in the wild

Brightness is an antonym of "dimness" or "dullness".
Brightness
Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold).
Opposite
Complementary antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite but whose meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum (push, pull).
Opposite
The antonym is polycarpic, a plant that flowers and sets seeds many times during its lifetime; the antonym of semelparous is iteroparous.
Monocarpy
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.
Unpaired word

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

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