Sep 19th , 2012
Word Wednesday: Contronym
The English language has gone through some interesting evolutions, and one of them is the creation of Contronym.
A Contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. Here are some interesting examples:
1. Bolt: secure (“He bolted the door”) but also to run away (“He got so afraid he bolted for the door”).
2. Off : could be either to stop (“turn that music off!”) or to start (“the alarm went off”).
3. Left: Remained (“I left you some apples“), or departed (“Elvis has left the building”).
4. Rock: An immobile mass of stone, being stable (“You can count on him, he’s a rock) or or a shaking or unsettling movement or action (“The mother rocked her baby to sleep”).
5. Dust means “to remove from” (“Please dust off this vase”) and “to add to” (“Dust the cake with cocoa”.
6. Can means “to save” (“She will can the peaches”) and “to discard” (
He’s about to can the worker”)
7. Strike - hit (“the empire strikes back”) and also miss (in baseball)
More interesting examples here , here and here,
If you have more interesting examples- let us know!
The Ginger Team
Posted in Archive
4 Responses to Word Wednesday: Contronym
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Efratk says:
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your feedback!
We are constantly improving our dictionaries, however our algorithm combines statistics and EVU is not a very common word.
I’ve forwarded your request to our team to process in any case.Thank you again and happy Gingering!
Efrat
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perera says:
I AM VERY INTERESTING TO LEARN CORRECT ENGLISH. SPECIALLLY MY LETTER WRITING
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I AM INERESTING TO LEARN CORRECT ENGLISH I AM SURE GINGER WILL HELP ME
I recently started using Ginger and it has helped in my short story writing. I have one problem in that when I create a fictional name such as Evu, it always want to correct it to Eve. In Word the spell check learns the new word but I cannot find how to do this with Ginger. Is this possible?