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prettygoodwordantonym (AN-tuh-nim) - n., a word that has the opposite meaning of another word.
Antonyms can be gradable, describing qualities on a continuous scale such as hot and cold, or complementary, describing binary opposites such as push and pull. As with synonyms, some antonyms apply onto to only some senses of one or both words, such as cleave and join (or for that matter, cleave and split). And of course, some words have synonyms but no antonyms, such as person. Antonym was coined surprisingly recently: in the 1840s in French as antonyme, on the model of synonym by swapping in the prefix ant(i)-, opposite. It was popularized in English with C.J. Smith's 1867 thesaurus Synonyms and Antonyms.
---L.
Antonyms can be gradable, describing qualities on a continuous scale such as hot and cold, or complementary, describing binary opposites such as push and pull. As with synonyms, some antonyms apply onto to only some senses of one or both words, such as cleave and join (or for that matter, cleave and split). And of course, some words have synonyms but no antonyms, such as person. Antonym was coined surprisingly recently: in the 1840s in French as antonyme, on the model of synonym by swapping in the prefix ant(i)-, opposite. It was popularized in English with C.J. Smith's 1867 thesaurus Synonyms and Antonyms.
---L.
