Auto-antonym

"Enantiodrome" redirects here. For the Jungian principle of equilibrium, see Enantiodromia.

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). 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."

Origins

The terms "autantonym" and "contronym" were originally coined by Joseph T. Shipley in 1960 and Jack Herring in 1962, respectively. A related term, pseudo-contronym, was coined by David Morice in 1987.^{[citation needed]}

Some pairs of contronyms are true homographs, i.e., distinct words with different etymology which happen to have the same form. For instance cleave "separate" is from Old English clēofan, while cleave "adhere" is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced differently. This is related to false friends, but false friends do not necessarily contradict.

Other contronyms result from polysemy, where a single word acquires different, and ultimately opposite, senses. For instance quite, which meant "clear" or "free" in Middle English, can mean "slightly" (quite nice) or "completely" (quite beautiful). Other examples include sanction — "permit" or "penalize"; bolt (originally from crossbows) — "leave quickly" or "fixed"; fast — "moving rapidly" or "unmoving". Many English examples result from nouns being verbed into distinct senses "add <noun> to" and "remove <noun> from"; e.g. dust, seed, stone (or pit).

Some contronyms result from differences in national varieties of English. For example, to table a bill means "to put it up for debate" in British English, while it means "to remove it from debate" in American English.

Often, one sense is more obscure or archaic, increasing the danger of misinterpretation when it does occur; for instance, the King James Bible often uses "let" in the sense of "forbid", a meaning which is now obsolete, except in the legal phrase "without let or hindrance" and in tennis, squash and Ping-Pong.

An apocryphal story relates how Charles II (or sometimes Queen Anne) described St Paul's Cathedral as "awful, pompous, and artificial", meaning in modern English "awe-inspiring, majestic, and ingeniously designed."

Auto-antonyms also exist in other languages. For example, in French hôte may mean either "host" or "guest"; the same is true for the Italian cognate ospite (both deriving from the Latin hospes). Hindi: कल (kal [kəl]) may mean either "yesterday" or "tomorrow" (disambiguated by the verb in the sentence). Italian ciao, Greek γειά and Hawaiian aloha, meaning both “hello” and “goodbye”. In Korean as spoken in South Korea, the words for "field marshal" and "enemy", "wonsu", are homophones. The two separate meanings are written distinctly in hanja, but appear as homographs in hangul. In North Korea, the latter meaning is pronounced as wonssu.

Sometimes an apparent opposition of senses comes from presuming the point of view of a different language. Latin altus can be translated "high" or "deep" in English, but in Latin had the single meaning "large in the vertical dimension". The difference in English between "high" and "deep" is in the speaker's point of view: a mountain is "high" because we are conceptually at the bottom of it, and the ocean is "deep" because we are conceptually at its top, but both were altus in Latin. This is still true in Italian, but the other Romance languages retain only the meaning "high".

In addition various neologisms or other such words that contain simultaneous opposing meanings when in the same context rather than alternate meanings depending on context, such as coopetition.

Examples

• "Apparent" can mean "obvious" or "seeming, but in fact not".
• "To buckle" can mean "to fasten" when used transitively or "to bend then break" intransitively.
• "To cleave" can mean "to cling" or "to split".
• "Fast" can mean "moving quickly" as in "running fast," or it can mean "not moving" as in "stuck fast."
• "To overlook" can mean "to inspect" or "to fail to notice".
• "Refrain" means both non-action and the repetition of an action, e.g. in musical notation.
• "To sanction" means "to permit", and also "to punish".
• "To stint" means "to stop", but the noun "stint" refers to the interval of work between stops.
• "Strike", in baseball terms, can mean "to hit the ball" or "to miss the ball".
• "To weather" can mean "to endure" (as in a storm) or "to erode" (as in a rock).
• "Weedy" can mean "overgrown" ("The garden is weedy") or stunted ("The boy looks weedy").

See also

• -onym

References

• Sheidlower, Jesse (November 1, 2005). "The Word We Love To Hate". Slate.

External links

• Antagonyms
• List of autoantonyms at fun-with-words.com
• Fun with Words at rinkworks.com