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Opposite (semantics) In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is male entails that it is not female. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition.
Contronym. A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings; such a word is also known as an antagonym, autoantonym, contranym, or Janus word. [ 1][ 2] For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [ 3][ 4] enantionymy ( enantio- means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy.
Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. For example: hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin, synonym ↔ antonym; Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle.
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
Oxymoron. Oxymorons are words that communicate contradictions. An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction. As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox.
Cognate. In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. [1] Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study ...
Antonyms have opposite meanings, such as the contrast between alive and dead or fast and slow. [c] One term is a hyponym of another term if the meaning of the first term is included in the meaning of the second term. For example, ant is a hyponym of insect. A prototype is a hyponym that has characteristic features of the type it belongs to.
Synonym (taxonomy) The Botanical and Zoological Codes of nomenclature treat the concept of synonymy differently. In botanical nomenclature, a synonym is a scientific name that applies to a taxon that (now) goes by a different scientific name. [1] For example, Linnaeus was the first to give a scientific name (under the currently used system of ...