antonym

Etymology

From French antonyme (1840s and 1850s), which was modeled on earlier synonyme and influenced by the etymons of Ancient Greek ἀντωνυμία (antōnumía, “pronoun”); credit for popularization of the French loanword's naturalization into English is given principally to Charles John Smith and his 1867 book Synonyms and Antonyms: Or, Kindred Words and Their Opposites. Collected and Contrasted. By surface analysis, ant- + -onym.

noun

1. (semantics) A word which has the opposite meaning of another word.
   “rich” is an antonym of “poor”; “full” is an antonym of “empty”
   1. A word that describes one end of a scale, while its opposite describes the other end, such as large versus small; a gradable antonym.
      All four lines of the pattern are required to establish that hot and cold are antonyms. The water is hot entails The water is not cold. The water is cold entails The water is not hot. The water is not hot does not entail The water is cold. The water is not cold does not entail The water is hot. 2005, Andrew John Merrison, Aileen Bloomer, Patrick Griffiths, Christopher J. Hall, Introducing Language in Use, page 111