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Auto-Antonyms
- stOneskull 7y agomy favourite type of word. although i refuse to accept the new definition of literally to mean figuratively. i want it taken back.
- thechao 7y agoThe word “literally” is an intensifier; do you have the same objection to the use of ‘really’, or ‘actually’? ‘Literally’ was first used to mean “from the text” in the late 17th c. By the early 19th c. it was already fully co-opted as an intensifier.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoIt still doesn't feel like "literally" has been fully co-opted to me, at least not for anyone who isn't a teenager. I'd same the same about "actually", but I don't think I've even heard teenagers use it as a mere intensifier.
- iikoolpp 7y agoIt's been fully co-opted everywhere except in the headspace of internet prescriptivists.
- ben509 7y agoMy theory of literally is that it's being used to indicate a literal rendition of the speaker's mental state. So it doesn't mean figuratively, it means "this exclamation is the most direct rendering of how I feel about this. " That is, it's literal because nothing was changed from the verbal impulse that immediately sprang to mind.
- torgard 7y agoI had not heard of this term before! And the inclusion of literally made me smile
- achairapart 7y agoI expected to find the word blues in it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- meuk 7y agoSuggestion: leave (verb) 1. To go away 2. To keep in place
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agocovered already by "left", its past-tense form
- meuk 7y agoThat was an oversight from my side ;)
- thaumasiotes 7y agoNot really an autoantonym, as the syntax of the sentence will only ever permit one or the other. ("Left" [remaining] is passive, while "left" [went away] is intransitive and therefore cannot be passive.)
- tyingq 7y agoI like the 3rd definition of this word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump
- drcongo 7y agoIt also means fart in British English. It was quite funny that the US had a President Fart for about 3 minutes until the reality set in.
- 4ndr3vv 7y agoSimilarly inverted: Johnson
- ScottBurson 7y agoA recent headline: "Floppy Johnson Can't Get an Election"
- chrisweekly 7y agoCool site / fun list. But -- and I realize this is pedantic, though if ever there were a time/place for it, it's commentary on a grammar site -- I feel "resign" doesn't quite belong on it. Resign (to sign again) is pronounced with a soft "ess", while (to quit) uses a "z" sound; they're different words w/ different pronunciations that happen to share the same spelling. Doesn't that make them homographs? Is there a special term for this case, perhaps homographic antonym, or anto-homograph?
- empath75 7y agoA lot of people would spell the first one re-sign.
- Spare_account 7y agoIndeed the function of the hyphenation is to avoid confusion with the homograph.
- jefftk 7y agoThe list is ones with the same spelling. If we went with same pronunciation we could add raise/raze.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y agoResign doesn’t really belong on this list. It isn’t an antonym of itself. Resign and resign are homographs with opposite(ish) meanings.
- XaspR8d 7y agoYeah, but that's a really challenging line to draw diachronically. For example, clip = to fasten originates from Old English `clyppan` (to embrace/clasp/surround), while clip = to cut originates somewhere Scandanavian, as in Old Norse' `klippa` (to clip/shear). Are those still homographs? I think a fair number of the list items are the result of convergent evolution.
- 7y ago
- tngranados 7y agoAladeen submission.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- coldpie 7y agoWith all the political discussion about Britain recently, the table/table antonym described in this list has come up among my friends lately. In Britain, you "table" a motion to put it up for consideration. In the US, if a motion is "tabled" it is put off until later. Very closely related but directly opposite meanings makes for some confusing discussions, where you need to know the nationality of the writer to have any chance of understanding the statement.
- J-dawg 7y agoA couple of others that baffle this British English speaker: - "I could care less" meaning "I couldn't care less" - "Entrée" meaning a main dish rather than a starter
- kdmccormick 7y agoI take "I could care less" to mean "I could care even less about this than I already do, that's how little it matters to me", but that could just be me trying to rationalize a mangled expression.
- Eggdog 7y agoWell, yes, but it's always possible to care less about something, unless you are already at the state of absolute-uncaring. Therefore, "I could care less" does nothing to express the desired sentiment. "I couldn't care less" is a much clearer reference to being at this state of absolute-uncaring.
- bonoboTP 7y agoI think the intended meaning by those who say it is: I'm currently caring too much because I'm talking about it even a little bit. I could easily care even less than this.
- marzell 7y agoWhat you said exactly makes no sense. If you said "I could NOT care less" it would mean, you care so little that it is not possible to care less than you do currently. Regardless, I think this is just a result of people getting lazy with their language... it is not meant to be said in this say, and is properly stated, "I couldn't care less". In the US (can't speak for elsewhere) people just repeat what they think others have said, to convey what they think they understood. This is the source of a lot of language rot.
- Grue3 7y ago"Terrific" used to be a synonym for "terrible", and "awesome" for "awful". Even the word "bad" has a slang meaning of "good". In Japanese 適当 is supposed to mean "appropriate, proper", but in practice it almost always means "unserious, sloppy, careless". Not sure how that came about.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y agoTerrific is my favorite autoantonym, but at this point the “terror causing” definition is little more than entomology trivia.
- Lxr 7y agoSimilar to 厉害 in Chinese - it often translates as terrible, but mostly used to mean great.
- gwd 7y ago"Awesome" and "Aweful" have similar etymologoies: both mean, "Inspiring or creating awe". But one has morphed into, "really good", and the other into "really bad".
- thaumasiotes 7y agoLikewise "terrible" and "terrific".
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
- AndrewOMartin 7y ago"quite" can be used to mean "entirely". "He was quite dead", "It was quite the worst thing I ever saw". It also means "partially". "It was quite nice", etc. I think this comes from people using the phrase "It was quite good" in cases when they weren't hugely impressed.
- oceliker 7y agoI read somewhere that American and British usage of “quite” is different — Americans use it to mean “entirely”, while British use it to mean “fairly”.
- dspillett 7y agoEnglish English speaker here: quite is often used both ways. While it is defined as meaning "fairly" it is usually used to mean a little more than that ("the weather is quite nice" means somewhere between "the weather is fair" and "the weather is nice"), it is also used to mean entirely but usually in a sarcastic manner where the juxtaposition of the entirelyness of your intent and the fairlyness of the actually meaning of the word stands out ("oh, you are quite wrong there"). Also, in combination with a negative it usually means entirely (as in "the job isn't quite done yet"). These are far from hard & fast rules though. In spoken situations the intended meaning is generally obvious from tone, in written text it can be quite ambiguous. There is at least one use where the word means both at once: when it is used on its own: Person one: "The man is an utter 'king imbecile", Person two: "Quite" or P1: "WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!", P2: "Quite". Here it means "I agree (on a binary yes/no level) but I wouldn't put it that strongly". Similar to how "indeed" is often used.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y agoThat’s interesting. I’m an American who frequently talks to brits, and I’ve never picked up on the different meaning of quite. I’ll make a point to listen for that in the future.
- OJFord 7y agoI'm British; are you quite sure about that? :trollface: it's definitely used both ways, but always clear from context I would say.
- 1-6 7y agoset = to put in place, to replace
- pure-awesome 7y agoI'm surprised "original" didn't make the list. For example, consider "An original telling of the story" vs "The original telling of the story".
- kace91 7y agoI'm not sure that qualifies as auto antonyms. Original means the origin/birth in both examples, the difference lies not in the meaning of original but in the word it affects (The telling, or the story itself)
- thrwaaayr488 7y agoGreat list! My favorite is on it. The verb "sanction" is my "favorite" since the two meanings are both political and totally opposite. If you just read "the United States sanctioned the action" you have literally no idea if it means they expressly allowed it, no problem go right ahead, or if it means they were so mad they did something negative in response, oh, we're punishing you for that. I would say you can't even use the word for that reason.
- bandrami 7y agoBecause of oversight, the activity was sanctioned. I love how that sentence yields 4 possible meanings.
- ScottBurson 7y agoI think the two meanings of "oversight" are not quite interchangeable. One is a mass noun (used without an article): "better oversight is needed"; while the other is a count noun (used with an article): "it was an oversight". So "because of oversight" sounds odd to me; I think it would be "because of an oversight", which would unambiguously indicate the "error" sense.
- afiler 7y ago"The activity was sanctioned because of the oversight" seems to work for me with both meanings of 'oversight'
- ScottBurson 7y agoAh, very good.
- pure-awesome 7y agoHonestly, usage of the word "sanction" should just be sanctioned.
- 7y ago
- daxfohl 7y agobiweekly et al - every other week - twice a week
- numlocked 7y agoSemiweekly is twice a week
- daxfohl 7y agoSo is biweekly.
- dspillett 7y agoI've heard Americans use biweekly to mean every two weeks. I've also seen them use it to mean twice a week, but more rarely than the other meaning. In the UK and other English speaking areas (Australia and New Zealand to name two) bi-weekely always means twice a week, following the same pattern as biannually and other examples. We use fortnightly to mean every two weeks, but the word fortnight is not commonly used in the US. Bimonthly is also ambiguous unfortunately. Again in the UK it would be taken as meaning twice per month (almost, but not quite, the same as fortnightly) but some others use it to mean every two months. Biannually seems to be consistently used and understood to mean twice per year, with biennial meaning every two years though that isn't a commonly used word in my experience (people tend to just say "every two years").
- jhbadger 7y agoOne (relatively) common usage of biennial (or its Italian spelling biennale) is in the art and cinema community as competitions tend to happen every other year and are called a biennale even in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biennale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biennale
- jessaustin 7y agoYou mean to say "semiannually", of course. As I've been told by many people for whom English is a second language, no one speaks English worse than the English. b^)
- Invictus0 7y agoHow about nonplussed? It means to be surprised and confused, and also unperturbed.
- hirundo 7y agoI wish it was socially acceptable to reply with a compiler error when people use these words. Like "Ambiguous token in the current namespace." Maybe that makes me a nerd, on the spectrum, or just pedantic. Or a pedantic nerd on the spectrum.
- alanbernstein 7y agoI replied "context error" in a chat with a friend once. It didn't go well.
- Doxin 7y agoSomewhat related: I wish human languages would have the concept of a parse error. Often enough someone says something to me that I'll hear with 100% clarity, but still have no clue what they are trying to say, after which it's often time to play the "what" game until they rephrase.
- enlyth 7y ago"Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you're saying, would you mind elaborating?"
- onorton 7y ago"Can you rephrase that?"
- slazaro 7y ago"Sorry, I understood the words but not the sentence"
- gnode 7y ago"Doesn't sound like anything to me."
- Doxin 7y agoAh but that's not strictly true, since it usually involves perfectly grammatically correct sentences that still just don't make sense.
- dsjoerg 7y agoThere's a classic Amelia Bedelia story about how she's instructed to "dust" a room and sprinkles dust over everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bedelia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bedelia
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoAmelia Bedelia should be required reading at some point. She's such a special character!
- adg29 7y agoWonder if NLP and machine learning algos are equipped to disambiguate the intended meaning of an autoantonym, with respect to its context.
- samatman 7y agoFairly sure a simple word2vec would cover the majority of cases.
- arsmoriendi 7y agoSlightly related: Homographic homophonic autantoyms http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1104 http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1104
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- air7 7y agoDo you mean literally as in • actually; really or • figuratively; virtually ?
- gwd 7y agoThat one really needs to go away from the list; I refuse to accept "figuratively" as a valid definition for "literally", and will contradict / argue with / make fun of anyone who does so.
- sudhirj 7y agoUnfortunately, it's literally come to mean of opposite of what it actually means.
- cbkeller 7y agoI sympathise, but for better or worse the OED reports that people have been using "literally" to mean "figuratively"* since at least 1769: > 1769 F. Brooke *Hist. Emily Montague* IV. ccxvii. 83 "He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies." > 1801 *Spirit of Farmers' Museum* 262 "He is, literally, made up of marechal powder, cravat, and bootees." > 1825 J. Denniston *Legends Galloway* 99 "Lady Kirkclaugh, who, literally worn to a shadow, died of a broken heart." > 1863 F. A. Kemble *Jrnl. Resid. Georgian Plantation* 105 "For the last four years..I literally coined money." > 1876 ‘M. Twain’ *Adventures Tom Sawyer* ii. 20 "And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth." [*] Or as they, put it, "Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense"
- quotemstr 7y agoThis style of argument is not persuasive. It can only tell us that people have been making an error since 1769 or something. It can't tell us that we should tolerate this error in well constructed writing. You're demonstrated nothing.
- tajstar 7y agoVery cool list. I little sad the word "peruse" mean to read over in an attentive or leisurely manner is not on the list it's one of my favorite autoantonyms.
- zrm 7y agoA lot of these are just words describing two-subject events. When there is a lease, someone is lending and someone is borrowing. Same for rent, bill, left, etc. A lot of the others are present vs. past tense. After you put something where you want it, you want it to stay put.
- harterrt 7y agoBiweekly? One every two weeks or twice a week.
- darkstar999 7y agoNo, those two aren't antonyms.
- marzell 7y agoBiweekly means every two weeks. Twice a week is "semiweekly" although people often get this wrong. There's also "semimonthly" for twice a month.
- loquor 7y agoWere auto-antonyms meant to have opposing meanings based on the context? Or do they become that way when people assume the meaning incorrectly? For example, nonplussed originally means to be surprised. But a layman would think that to be 'plussed' must be to be surprised and nonplussed must be the opposite of that. Is this how auto-antonyms come to be?
- djsumdog 7y agoIt explains it a bit at the bottom of the article with dust (to dust furniture is to clean them, but to dust crops is to put dust on them); but it does seem to be around noun/verb context/usage.
- genmon 7y agoMy favourites are words that mean the opposite in different Englishes. For example * to table: postpone (US English) vs put forward for consideration (British English) * to (take a) punt: give up (US) vs go ahead (British) What could we call these... Alter-Anglo-Auto-Antonyms?
- vumgl 7y agoAlso, this used to cause trouble with phone operators connecting phone calls between USA and England: "are you through?" could mean either "are you connected?" or "are you done with the conversation?"
- ScottBurson 7y agoPunt is an interesting one. I think the original meaning was "offer". I've seen it used this way in the British press: The company is punting a new product. This could have been the original meaning in American football: to punt the ball is to offer it to the opponents. But since a team punts when they have given up on making a first down, the meaning of punt shifted to "give up".
- spieglt 7y ago"Cheap" is another one that bothered me as a kid. It means both "of low quality considering its price" and "of low price considering its quality."
- hanoz 7y agoAnd in turn its antonym "dear" is similarly conflicted.
- pessimizer 7y ago"Premium" as an adjective means either expensive or cheap/free.
- daxfohl 7y agoHysterical: extremely funny or horrified.
- tlb 7y agoI like homeophone-antonyms -- words with antonyms that sound similar enough that if you slur a little bit, people won't be sure which you said. Eg: I find your suggestion risible/reasonable.
- jwilk 7y agoWiktionary has a longer list: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_contranyms https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_contranyms
- marzell 7y agoAs an American English speaker, I've only used "overlook" as a verb to mean "miss noticing entirely", but as a noun related to "examine", for instance a "forest overlook" might be a scenic turnout on the side of a road that provides a view where the forest could be "examined". Similarly we use the word "oversee" for examining/observing... however "oversight" has taken on the role of an Auto-Antonym. We often use "oversight" and "lack of oversight" to mean the same thing, that something was missed due to carelessness... but we also use it to mean "supervision" that should prevent careless omissions from happening.
- m12k 7y agoIn the case of such a scenic turnout, wouldn't you then also use "overlook" as a verb, for example in 'the hills that overlook the valley'?
- air7 7y agoThis happened to me just now: In a two story building, "First Floor" can mean either one.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIn the US, first floor is what Europeans call the ground floor. So I think it depends on where you are.
- billfruit 7y agoI think list is missing a most interesting word of this type, 'nonplussed', which can mean either perturbed or not perturbed.
- ScottBurson 7y agoNever heard it used to mean "not perturbed"; I think it's just a misconstrual. The origin of the word is the French "non plus" meaning "no more": one can't think of anything else to say; one is speechless.
- billfruit 7y agoNow in common usage among Americans it seems to mean "not perturbed". https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/nonplussed https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/nonplussed
- the_af 7y agoNot exactly an auto-antonym, but similar: in Spanish we have a verb, "alquilar", which means simultaneously "to rent" and "to rent out", and it drives me crazy that it's often unclear from which end of the relation one is speaking: "Man, the law is so unfair to people who rent!" "Do you mean unfair to the owner of the property or to the tenant who pays the rent?" (It doesn't translate perfectly to English, but works in Spanish) edit: wait, I see "lease" is in the list and it has exactly the same problem! Take that, English language! :D
- joemi 7y agoI'm not sure if it's officially correct, but I've heard both "rent to" and "rent from" used colloquially in (American) English.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoI'm sure you're also able to indicate the roles of tenant and landlord in Spanish. But just like in English, you're not required to.
- the_af 7y agoRight! You have "propietario" (the person who owns the property) and "inquilino" (the person paying the rent). But confusingly enough the verb is still "alquilar" ("to rent") for both :) So if you say "voy a alquilar esta casa" ("I'm going to rent this house") it's not clear whether you're the landlord or the tenant.
- jessaustin 7y ago"Renter" would also be ambiguous, although "lessor" and "lessee" do have specific meanings.
- yesbabyyes 7y agoIn Swedish, it's also the same word ("hyra") but the meaning is conveyed by adding "ut" ("out"). So the tenant hyr what the landlord hyr ut.
- yellowapple 7y agoI don't get the inclusion of "comprise". How are "to contain; include" and "to be composed of; consist of" opposites of one another? Consisting of or being composed of something definitionally means containing or including it, no?
- jessaustin 7y agoYes, these two definitions are very close to each other. "Comprise" does not belong here. Others I would remove: "quantum": It really means something more like "discrete", and discrete values might be small or large depending on one's perspective. "splice": I find no support for the second definition. Still, many of these are very nice.
- benj111 7y agoShit •very good, excellent; "cool". •of poor quality; "bad". http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/shit http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/shit Edit: Credit? Theres credit in the sense of receiving money, and money in the sense of money going out. This probably makes more sense to people who have learnt double entry book keeping where credit and debits are reversed compared to popular usage.
- dwohnitmok 7y ago"Shit" is an interesting case and not a straightforward auto-antonym. The meaning of shit hinges entirely on whether it is preceded by "the."
- brianpgordon 7y agoCollections of words like this really amuse me for some reason. I have my own collection of animal names which are also verbs: https://gist.github.com/briangordon/e64d58b6b9abab346014ff05f56ad920 https://gist.github.com/briangordon/e64d58b6b9abab346014ff05...
- kashyapc 7y agoAppreciate this; thanks! On the misuse of the word "literally", I wholeheartedly agree with the following reader comment from an excellent EconTalk podcast, "John McWhorter on the Evolution of Language and Words on the Move"[1]: This whole “literally” issue seems to have been mis-framed. The reason many of us object to the use of the word “literally” to mean “figuratively” isn’t that we can’t stand the thought of language evolving; it’s because there’s no replacement for it! I once had a friend say to me, “X is literally Y, and I mean ‘literally’ literally (not figuratively).” - - - From the same[1] podcast, I also learnt about this fun concept called "backshift": when two words join to become a single word (e.g. "breakfast", "blackboard", etc), the accent often shifts to the first word. In McWhorter's words: When something becomes an established concept and it's made up of two or more words, then you, very often have that shift to the back of the word [i.e. the first word]. I'm not all doing justice to the topic. But go check the transcript[1] for "backshift", Mcwhorter gives more context. I'd strongly suggest to listen to it; it clicks much better, as we're talking about word accents. [1] https://www.econtalk.org/john-mcwhorter-on-the-evolution-of-language-and-words-on-the-move/ https://www.econtalk.org/john-mcwhorter-on-the-evolution-of-...
- ScottBurson 7y agoThey should add the very similar "cite" and "citation". You can be cited for bravery, or for speeding.
- jmah 7y agoMaybe an encompassing description of "cite" is "to publicly recognize"
- cmonnow 7y agoliterally is literally my favorite
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nmstoker 7y agoMight not quite qualify as an auto-antonym, but I am entertained by the new use of "drop" which is increasingly common in ambiguous headlines, perhaps because the dual meaning enhances the clickbait level: "Apple has dropped feature X" - they're revealed this new feature "Apple has dropped feature X" - they no longer support this feature
- rm445 7y agoHeadline writers using 'dated' to mean a release date (of say a film or game) has been announced, I can't help reading as judgement that the unreleased item is already passé. Even further from being an auto-antonym, but positive and negative meanings both related to time.
- schoen 7y agoThere are some religious concepts that could be seen as auto-antonyms. The Polynesian words from which we get "taboo" refer to something sacred to the gods, which therefore ordinary people are forbidden to use or interfere with. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tapu https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tapu https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kapu#Hawaiian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kapu#Hawaiian The taboo thing could therefore be seen as very good and important (for gods) or as very bad, improper, or dangerous (for people, outside of the appropriate religious context). I think that many cultures have had a similar dual connotation in words related to sacred things, even if they don't have exactly the same cultural rules. It's interesting to look at the meanings of Latin "sacer" (the origin of our word "sacred") as an analogy: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sacer#Adjective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sacer#Adjective
- smilekzs 7y ago> temper (1) to soften; mollify (2) to strengthen (e.g. a metal) Not contradictory because hardness and toughness are 2 distinct (though correlated) properties. Tempering [1] is basically a process that trades some hardness (i.e. soften) for a lot of toughness (i.e. strengthen). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempering_(metallurgy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempering_(metallurgy)
- spodek 7y agoAcademic can mean - important enough to merit study - trivial enough to be dismissed
- rkuykendall-com 7y agoOne I noticed at the grocery is pre-cooked. It means cooked for Turkeys and uncooked for Tortillas.
- ccvannorman 7y agoArtifact: Intentional object created by humans Artifact: Unintentional/erroneous feature expressed in the creation of an object