Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Antagonyms. I don't know what got into me, but I decided to try to determine what to call self-contradicting words, e.g., ravel, cleave, sanction. My wife, Cheryl, and I have enjoyed discussing such words for years. So I went to Google to find out what words have been coined to refer to such words, and it is a mess. Here are the results: amphibolous/words 539/4 antagonyms 573 antilogies/dust 314/9 auto-antonyms/autoantonyms/combined 43/93/142 contronyms/contranyms/combined 470/216/681 enantiodromes/-dromic/-nymy 3/75/2 janus words 126 self-antonyms 37 self-contradicting words 15 The two front runners appear to be Antagonyms and "contronyms"/"contranyms". (Amphibolous refers to a grammatical construction that can be interpreted in different ways, hence the large number. "Amphibolous words" has few hits.) So I guess I'll go with antagonyms, since there is no confusion as to spelling (i.e., zero Google hits for "antaganyms"). Here is a list of Web sites with lists or discussions of such words: http://ccins.camosun.bc.ca/~peterm/venus/contranyms.html http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-553.html http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/%7Eseth/misc/selfantonyms.html http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/cntrnmys.htm http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ecellis/antagonym.html http://thinks.com/words/autoantonyms.htm http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_autoantonyms.html http://www.users.bigpond.com/burnside/contradicting.htm 6:52:24 AM