Sharp PW-E310 Opposites, Related terms, Combining forms, Awkward synonyms and confusables

Opposites

Many synonym sets are followed by one or more words that have the opposite meaning from the headword, often called 'antonyms'. There are several different kinds of antonym. True and false are absolute antonyms, with no middle ground. Logically, a statement is either true or false, but cannot be slightly true or rather false. Hot and cold, on the other hand, are antonyms with gradations of meaning: it makes perfectly good sense to say that something is rather hot or very cold, and there are a number of words (warm, tepid, cool) which represent intermediate stages. It makes sense to ask about something "How hot is it?" but that commits the speaker to the notion that it is hot at least to some extent. So hot and cold are at opposite ends of a continuum, rather than being absolutes.

For many words, there is no single word that counts as an antonym, but there may be a phrase that gets the opposite meaning across. For example, what is the opposite of senile? There is no exact antonym, but the phrase in the prime of life gets the opposite meaning across. In this title the broadest possible definition has been adopted, giving the maximum amount of information to the user. In some cases, a phrasal antonym is given for a phrasal subentry, e.g. bottle things up as an antonym for let off steam.

The antonyms given in this thesaurus are not the only possible opposites, but they are usually the furthest in meaning from the headword. By looking up the 'opposite' word as an entry in its own right, the user will generally find a much larger range of antonyms to choose from. For example, at the entry for delete the user will find:

-OPPOSITE(S) add, insert.

Both add and insert are entries in their own right.

Related terms

A special feature of NOTE is that it gives not only synonyms and opposites but also other related terms, especially for concrete nouns such as milk (where lactic is not a synonym, but a word with a related meaning) and town (municipal, urban, and oppidan). There are two types of related words: the first are adjectives which usually mean 'relating to' the headword but have a different origin (e.g. lactic for milk) and which may therefore not spring to mind as quickly as a straightforward derivative such as milky. The second type is typically a word very closely associated

with the headword, but with a different meaning. For example, a related word may denote a part of the thing denoted by the headword, or it may denote a particular form of this thing. Thus, at barrel, the related words given are cooper, stave, and hoop - a maker of barrels, and two important components of a barrel.

Combining forms

Combining forms are given after related terms. These are very similar to the first kind of related terms, but in the form of a prefix or suffix that is used in combination with other elements, e.g. oeno- with the sense 'wine', as in oenology, or -vorouswith the sense 'eat', as in carnivorous.

Awkward synonyms and confusables ()

One thing a plain list of synonyms cannot do is help the user choose between them by describing their nuances and connotations. For instance, the words blunt, candid, forthright, frank, and outspoken are all given as synonyms of each other, because they all have roughly the same meaning. But there are subtle differences. This set comprises one of the 120 studies of 'Awkward Synonyms' in the New Oxford Thesaurus of English, devoted to explaining the differences in meaning between close synonyms. The distinctions are based on careful analysis of actual usage as recorded in the British National Corpus, and examples of typical usage are given, selected from the British National Corpus and the citation collection of the Oxford Reading Programme.

The other type of article displayed as a note (), 'Confusables', compares words which may cause difficulty for the opposite reason to 'awkward synonyms': they are usually similar in form, as are militate and mitigate, and sometimes even pronounced the same, as are principal and principle, but are very different in meaning. (Where an entry includes a link to either type of usage note, an asterisk () is displayed at the top of the entry.)

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