# Words that mean something and it's opposite? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 7, 2017, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068 "2017-05-07T17:06:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Weisshund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ba8739/32.png) [@Weisshund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weisshund)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/21 "2017-05-08T01:38:38Z")
Bad something is not good, or something is very good ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/22 "2017-05-08T02:50:45Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > 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. Did the papers really do that? The New York Times is known to be an outlier (in the US) in that it uses honorifics. Most simply use the last name. Quickly looking at the Chicago Tribune from 1984, she was simply referred to as Ferraro on second reference and onward. ---
**Author:** ![drad\_dog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@drad\_dog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drad_dog)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/23 "2017-05-08T02:51:06Z")
> [@Kamino\_Neko](#): > > 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. Just looked at the cite cited herein and it’s part of the list, as a homograph: 1. Resign works as a contronym in writing. This time we have homographs, but not homophones. “Resign,” meaning ‘to quit,’ is spelled the same as “resign,” meaning ‘to sign up again,’ but it’s pronounced differently. ---
**Author:** ![drad\_dog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@drad\_dog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drad_dog)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/24 "2017-05-08T02:52:27Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Literally I don’t see it. Figuratively is the opposite, and literarily isn’t the same. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/25 "2017-05-08T02:54:37Z")
I don’t think I’ve ever seen re-sign spelled as resign in writing, just for the reason that the spelling introduces ambiguity and confusion. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, but I’d be willing to bet the style guides and dictionaries recommend the hyphenated spelling. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/26 "2017-05-08T04:03:33Z")
> [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > 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. Don’t see any actual opposite meanings in there. > [@igor\_frankensteen](#): > > 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. The “in-” in _inflamable_ is actually a different prefix than the one in _inflexible_. It’s usually written “en-” and can be found in various words like _engulf_ and _encompass_. Perhaps we should change the spelling to _enflamable_. > [@drad\_dog](#): > > I don’t see it. Figuratively is the opposite, and literarily isn’t the same. “Literally” is figuratively its own opposite, but is literally not. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 5:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/27 "2017-05-08T05:02:05Z")
> [@drad\_dog](#): > > I don’t see it. Figuratively is the opposite, and literarily isn’t the same. To me, literally has literally one meaning. But to some other people it has literally _millions_. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/28 "2017-05-08T06:36:18Z")
Arabic auto-antonyms have constituted a whole subfield of Arabic philology for centuries, [whole books](http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B6%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF) being written about them. They’re called الأضداد [al-aḍdād](http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/ER/detail/hkul/3849764), ‘the contraries’. السُّدْفة al-sudfah means both ‘in the darkness’ and ‘in the light’ الصريم al-ṣarīm means both ‘night’ and ‘day’. الناهل al-nāhil means both ‘thirsty’ and ‘someone who drank their fill’ being a few examples. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/29 "2017-05-08T08:22:00Z")
Two phrases that come to mind: ‘Its downhill from now on’ [a] - plain-sailing, easy, cruisy \*\* - getting progressively worse ‘[something] is Mickey Mouse’ [a] - shiny, new, excellent [a particularly Australian usage, rhyming slang for grouse, as in shiny, new, excellent] \*\* - inconsequential, cheap and nasty, a piece of shit ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 10:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/30 "2017-05-08T10:16:00Z")
Banksiaman: What is shiny and new about pheasant-like wildfowl? Johanna: Are any of those words homophones – “convergent evolution” of unrelated root words – or else are they truly single words that somehow evolved to have opposite meanings? ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Pearse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/richard_pearse/32/13144_2.png) [@Richard\_Pearse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Pearse)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 10:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/31 "2017-05-08T10:29:42Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > To me, literally has literally one meaning. > But to some other people it has literally _millions_. The opposite of literally is figuratively. The alternate use of literally is not instead of figuratively, it is an intensifier. Its use is still actually the same as it normally is but you aren’t meant to take it literally. Compare it to other intensifiers and exaggerations. “I saw billions of cats on the side of the road today.” Well, no you didn’t, you saw lots and you are exaggerating for effect by saying “billions”, but that doesn’t mean that billions is being used in an opposite sense to how it is normally used, it’s just being used as an exaggeration, it still means multiples of a thousand million, even if that is not actually how many cats there were. Likewise with literally, it is not used in place of “figuratively”. ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 10:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/32 "2017-05-08T10:53:33Z")
> [@igor\_frankensteen](#): > > 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. We have a popular news-plus-music-plus phone-in radio show here at lunch time. When the current presenter (a journalist) was fairly new, he was doing an item based on a report of a leaking fuel tanker. After the experts had pontificated, a tanker driver phoned in with a sensible comment about safety and he talked about “flammable” loads. The presenter interrupted him (destroying the point of his comment) and told him that he meant “inflammable” to the general annoyance of everyone who knew that the “in” prefix had been officially dropped some years earlier to prevent confusion. The point of the story is that here was a journo correcting someone who did that stuff for a living. He did apologize the following day. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 11:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/33 "2017-05-08T11:00:07Z")
> [@Richard\_Pearse](#): > > The opposite of literally is figuratively. The alternate use of literally is not instead of figuratively, it is an intensifier. Its use is still actually the same as it normally is but you aren’t meant to take it literally. Right you are. I literally didn’t think it through. ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 11:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/34 "2017-05-08T11:00:22Z")
Even more fun is the practice of building up chains of synonyms such that the endpoints of the chain are antonyms. For example, take the words _stay_ and _depart_—these are antonyms, because the usual meaning of _stay_ is “to remain in a certain location”, while _depart_ typically means “to leave a certain location”. But there is another, not uncommon sense of the word _stay_, meaning “to cease or prevent movement”. Therefore we can say that _stop_, which also means “to cease or prevent movement”, is a synonym of _stay_. Similarly, _stop_ and _quit_ are synonyms, in the sense of ceasing an activity: to quit smoking, for example, is the same thing as to stop smoking. Finally, _quit_ and _depart_ are synonyms, because they can both mean “to leave a certain location”. So we have just “proven” that _stay_ and _depart_ are not only antonyms but also synonyms (or maybe contronyms). If this sort of thing interests anyone, a while back I wrote [a piece for _Word Ways_](http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5341&context=wordways) that lists a bunch of these antonymic synonym chains. Or if you prefer a challenge, you can try your hand at constructing the chains yourself with [this contronym puzzle of mine](http://www.babelzine.com/docs/2016/issue16/files/49.html) from _Babel: The Language Magazine_. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 11:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/35 "2017-05-08T11:25:07Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > Banksiaman: What is shiny and new about pheasant-like wildfowl? > … Oh, they fairly gleam with a brisk polish, they do. Alternately, grouse is an Australian expression which apparently comes from northern or Scottish dialects. If something is grouse its pretty good, and the transfer to Mickey Mouse is probably rhyming slang. Grouse is still in reasonably wide use I think, while the only time I ever heard Mickey Mouse actually said by an old codger i had to ask which of the meanings he intended. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/36 "2017-05-08T11:28:39Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > Banksiaman: What is shiny and new about pheasant-like wildfowl? > > Johanna: Are any of those words homophones – “convergent evolution” of unrelated root words – or else are they truly single words that somehow evolved to have opposite meanings? Banskiaman, got it – “grouse” is Australian slang for “awesome” (perhaps originally a blend of “great” and “fabulous.”) Edit: Ninja’d! 😉 Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 12:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/37 "2017-05-08T12:38:26Z")
> [@Richard\_Pearse](#): > > The opposite of literally is figuratively. The alternate use of literally is not instead of figuratively, it is an intensifier. Its use is still actually the same as it normally is but you aren’t meant to take it literally. Exactly, it sometimes is used as an intensifier for a clichéd metaphor essentially meaning “I know that the following figurative phrase is bandied about a lot, but this time it really is appropriate”. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/38 "2017-05-08T14:17:37Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > الصريم al-ṣarīm means both ‘night’ and ‘day’. I’m guessing this is similar to how the English word “day” can mean “period of daylight” OR “24-hour period,” and in Arabic the “24-hour period” meaning is associated with “night” (in English, we think this way when booking hotel reservations, for example). ---
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/39 "2017-05-08T14:59:43Z")
Korean is full of homophones due to derivation of a lot of the vocabulary from Chinese (though sometimes via Japanese or Korean coinage of terms) but lack of tonal disambiguation in Modern Korean of Chinese characters of otherwise similar sound. This is probably influenced by the modern dominance of the alphabet which likewise does not disambiguate (in very ambiguous cases even native readers are sometimes aided by writing the word parenthetically in Chinese characters). A few end up being homophone antonyms, for example: 방화 banghwa can be 放火=arson or 防火=fire prevention (Fànghuǒ and Fánghuǒ in Mandarin but I believe the first is a Japanese coinage, not the usual word in Chinese) 실권 shilgweon can be 失權=loss of power or 實權=real power (Shīquán and Shíquán) ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2017, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068/40 "2017-05-08T15:22:33Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > Don’t see any actual opposite meanings in there. Are any of the examples in this thread exact opposites? When you sanction an event, you agree to let it to take place under a certain set of laws or rules. “Sanction” (in the sense of punishment) is applied to a person who breaks those rules. Very different usages, but I wouldn’t call them perfect antonyms, either. By that standard, I think “scale” counts. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/words-that-mean-something-and-its-opposite/786068.md?page=3)