Auto-antonymy

An auto-antonym or autantonym, also called a contronym or antagonym among other terms, is a word with multiple meanings (senses) of which one is the reverse of another. For example, the word '' cleave'' can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This phenomenon is called enantiosemy, enantionymy ('' enantio-'' means "opposite"), antilogy or autantonymy. An enantiosemic term is necessarily polysemic.

Nomenclature

An auto-antonym is alternatively called an antagonym, contronym, contranym, enantiodrome, enantionym, Janus word (after the Roman god Janus, who is usually depicted with two faces), self-antonym, antilogy, or addad (Arabic, singular didd).

Linguistic mechanisms

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.

Other contronyms are a form of polysemy, but where a single word acquires different and ultimately opposite definitions. For example, ''sanction''—"permit" or " penalize"; ''bolt'' (originally from crossbows)—"leave quickly" or "fix/immobilize"; ''fast''—"moving rapidly" or "unmoving". Some English examples result from nouns being verbed in the patterns of "add <noun> to" and "remove <noun> from"; e.g. ''dust'', ''seed'', ''stone''. Denotations and connotations can drift or branch over centuries. An apocryphal story relates how Charles II (or sometimes Queen Anne) described St Paul's Cathedral (using contemporaneous English) as "," with the meaning (rendered in modern English) of "awe-inspiring, majestic, and ingeniously designed". Negative words such as and ''sick'' sometimes acquire ironic senses referring to traits that are impressive and admired, if not necessarily positive (''that outfit is bad as hell''; ''lyrics full of sick burns'').

Some contronyms result from differences in 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 (where British English would have "shelve", which in this sense has an identical meaning in American English). To ''barrack'', in Australian English, is to loudly demonstrate support, while in British English it is to express disapproval and contempt.

Some words contain simultaneous opposing or competing meanings in the same context, rather than alternative meanings in different contexts; examples include blend words such as ''coopetition'' (meaning a murky blend of cooperation and competition), ''frenemy'' (meaning a murky blend of friend and enemy), ''glocalization'', etc. These are not usually classed as contronyms, but they share the theme of containing opposing meanings.

In Latin, has the double meaning "sacred, holy" and "accursed, infamous". Greek gave Latin its , from which English got its ''demiurge'', which can refer either to God as the creator or to the devil, depending on philosophical context.

In some languages, a word stem associated with a single event may treat the action of that event as unitary, so in translation it may appear contronymic. For example, Latin can be translated as both "guest" and "host". In some varieties of English, ''borrow'' may mean both "borrow" and "lend".

Examples

English

* ''Cleave'' can mean "to cling" or "to split apart".
* ''Clip'' can mean "attach" or "cut off".
* ''Dust'' can mean "to remove dust” (cleaning a house) or "to add dust" (e.g., to dust a cake with powdered sugar).
* ''Fast'' can mean "without moving; fixed in place", (holding fast, also as in "steadfast"), or "moving quickly".
* ''Obbligato'' in music can refer to a passage that is either "obligatory" or "optional".
* ''Oversight'' can mean "accidental omission or error", or "close scrutiny and control".
* ''Peruse'' can mean to "consider with attention and in detail" or "look over or through in a casual or cursory manner".
* ''Ravel'' can mean "to separate" (e.g., threads in cloth) or "to entangle".
* ''Sanction'' can mean "approve" or "penalize".
* ''Table'' can mean "to discuss a topic at a meeting" (''British English'') or "to postpone discussion of a topic" (''American English'').

Other languages

Nouns

* The Korean language, Korean noun 앞(''ap'') may mean either "future" or "past" (distinguished by context).

Verbs

* The German verb '' ausleihen'', the Dutch verb '' lenen'', the Polish verb pożyczyć, the Russian verb одолжить (''odolžítʹ''), the Finnish verb '' lainata'', and the Esperanto verb prunti can mean either "to lend" or "to borrow", with case, pronouns, and mention of persons making the sense clear. The verb stem conveys that "a lending-and-borrowing event is occurring", and the other cues convey who is lending to whom. This makes sense because anytime lending is occurring, borrowing is simultaneously occurring; one cannot happen without the other.
* The Romanian verb ''a închiria'', the French verb ''louer'', and the Finnish verb ''vuokrata'' mean "to rent" (as the lessee does) as well as "to let" (as the lessor does).
* The Swahili verb ''kutoa'' means both "to remove" and "to add".
* The Chinese word "大败", it means both "be defeated" and "to defeat".
* The Persian verb چیدن (''čidan'') means both "to pluck" and "to arrange" (i.e. by putting objects down).
* In Spanish (basic meaning "to give"), when applied to lessons or subjects, can mean "to teach", "to take classes" or "to recite", depending on the context.
* The Indonesian verb ''menghiraukan'' and ''mengacuhkan'' can mean "to regard" or "to ignore".
* The Indonesian/Malay adjective ''usah'' can mean "required" or "discouraged".

Adverbs

* hi, कल and ur, کل (''kal'' ) may mean either "yesterday" or "tomorrow" (disambiguated by the verb in the sentence).
* can mean both "a while ago" and "in a little bit/later on"

Agent nouns

* The Italian, Spanish and French cognates, '' ospite'', '' huésped'' and '' hôte'', respectively, also can mean "host" or "guest". The three words derive from the Latin '' hospes'', which also carries both meanings.

Adjectives

*The Latin ''sinister'' means both "auspicious" (from Roman tradition) and "inauspicious" (from Greek tradition). The negative Greek meaning was carried on into French and ultimately English.
*Latin means "excessive, too much". It maintained this meaning in Spanish , but it was also misinterpreted as "insignificant, without importance".
* means among other things "bright, clear" (from Sino-Vietnamese ) and "dead, gloomy" (from ). Because of this, the name of the dwarf planet Pluto is not adapted from as in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

In translation

Seeming auto-antonyms can occur from translation. In Hawaiian, for example, ''aloha'' is translated both as "hello" and as "goodbye", but the essential meaning of the word is "love", whether used as a greeting or farewell. The Italian greeting ''ciao'' is translated as "hello" or "goodbye" depending on the context; the original meaning was "at your service" (literally "(I'm your) slave").Ronnie Ferguson, ''A linguistic history of Venice'', 2007, , p. 284

See also

* Skunked term
*-onym
*Oxymoron
* Īhām

References

Further reading

* Sheidlower, Jesse (1 November 2005)
"The Word We Love To Hate"
''Slate''.
* Leithauser, Brad (14 October 2013)
"Unusable Words"
''The New Yorker''.
* Schulz, Kathryn (7 April 2015)
What Part of "No, Totally" Don't You Understand?
''The New Yorker''.

External links

{{wiktionarycat, type=Auto-antonyms, category=English contranyms
* Contranyms by language in Wiktionary
List of auto-antonyms

Semantics
Word play
False friends
Types of words
Dichotomies
Ambiguity
Polysemy