Words that mean something and it's opposite?

Factual Questions
1

I know cleave is said to be one.

I have two more for consideration:

Resign: meaning quitting your job and also re-upping on your job.

Oversight: Can be inspecting for flaws in a system, and also can be an error made in that system.

Anyone have others?

2

Combine.

Accented on the second syllable, a verb meaning to put some components together.
Accented on the first syllable, a verb meaning tseparate by means of operating an agricultural impolement known as a Combine, short for combination harvester (combined with a tractor which supplies the operating power), having the effect of separating components of gathered crop material.

3

Sanction and sanction. Either permitting something, or preventing it.

4

Here’s a bunch.

5

Fast
Moot

6

Off:

The alarm went off so I turned it off

7

As that article explains, they are called contronyms or auto-antonyms. See the Wikipedia article.

8

Bad

9

[Moderating]

Not really an arts topic. Moving to GQ.

10

I wouldn’t call resign an auto-antonym, since the two meanings are pronounced differently. And they’re not usually spelt the same either - I’ve more often seen the ‘quit’ meaning spelt with a hyphen - re-sign.

They’re two different words that are occasionally spelt the same. Etymologically related (ultimately from the same Latin roots, though via different paths at different times), to be sure, but different words.

11

In that list they offer “help”.

I would argue that “you can’t help doing something” doesn’t really make sense, and it doesn’t mean “prevent”, but is just a colourful way of saying “unless you are impelled to do something”, or “are unable to stop yourself from doing something”…

12

I think “scale” can be a double contronym. To scale a mountain is to climb on top of it; to scale a fish is to remove something from it. To be paid scale is to receive a specific amount; in music a scale is a a range of notes or frequencies.

13

Wooded

14

Fun stuff. not meaning to be a negative nannyboo, but a fair number of this kind of thing, is due to the poor quality of language education in the world. Word usage is always evolving, and since most people learn words by having them used ON THEM, misinterpretations turn into new meanings. So do laziness, and language-barrier-caused misuses. If you read the details in the linked article, you will find several examples of words which were once correctly used, including the additional words required to make them make sense, but over time, people left the additionally required words off, and we arrived at the modern contradictory meanings.

Anyway. Another sort of on-the-other-side-of-the-same-coin words, are flammable and inflammable. They mean the exact same thing, even though putting “in” as a prefix in front of most other words, means “the opposite of.” Flexible and inflexible are true opposites.

15

Huh? :confused: Other way around, I should think: “I’ll resign tomorrow because I didn’t get a raise” and “I’ll re-sign tomorrow, now that I’ve got my raise.”

It’s worth noting that English has few rules, but a number of tendencies; f’rinstance, many words are spelled the same but pronounced differently, depending on whether they’re nouns (stress on the first syllable) or verbs (stress on the second syllable), e.g., REC-ord and re-CORD. Another is the difference between British and American English, e.g., GAR-age vs. ga-RAGE, or cigar-ETTE vs. CIG-arette. (Americans sometimes use the abbreviated spelling “cigaret,” BTW.)

I used to have a whole list of such patterns when I was teaching English as a foreign language, but I’m afraid it’s vanished.

For the record, the possessive adjectives are: Mine, his, hers, its; Ours, yours, theirs. No apostrophes.

IIRC, the NY Times’ style guide also stipulates “exactly the same thing,” not “the exact same thing.”

16

Not the same word, but homophones with opposite meanings:

Raise: To lift, as in a barn raising
Raze: To tear down, as in razing the barn to the ground.

17

Does the NYT style guide still say that “Ms.” doesn’t exist? The paper refused to do what every other paper in the country did when Geraldine Ferraro was running for VP, and call Her Ms. Ferraro. Which she wasn’t. Her maiden name was Ferraro, but as she kept it after her marriage, she wasn’t properly either Miss or Mrs. Ferraro. Her husband’s last name, IIRC, was Zaccaro, so I suppose the paper could have insisted on Mrs. Zaccaro, but that was not her legal name, and would not be on the ballot.

My mother made my father boycott it during the election, which was a sore spot, because it was his favorite paper. My mother read The Village Voice. Plus the local rag.

18

Literally

19

I would also argue that this is in error:
[QUOTE=Mental Floss]

  1. Off means ‘deactivated,’ as in “to turn off,” but also ‘activated,’ as in “The alarm went off.”
    [/quote]
    Go off is a phrasal verb, and as such is a composite lexical item. You can’t extract the particle (off) and assign it a meaning that derives from the composite as though that meaning were independent of the phrasal verb from which it was originally extracted.
20

Oops, you’re right. I cocked up that sentence, and I’m not sure how. :smack:

The ‘quit’ definition is invariably spelt as one word, the ‘sign again’ definition is usually hyphenated.