Words & WritingGreek → English
Antonym
/ˈæntənɪm/noun
A word that means the opposite of another.
The Greek roots
ἀντί
antí
opposite, against
ὄνυμα
ónyma
name, word
Literally: “opposite name”
The story of the word
The word is modern, built in the 1860s on the model of synonym, which really is ancient. Greek had ἀντωνυμία, but it meant the pronoun, a word standing in place of a name. Most of the -onym family came out of the same 19th-century workshop: pseudonym, homonym, eponym, acronym, made to fill gaps that grammarians and printers had started to notice. ὄνυμα is the dialect form; Attic Greek said ὄνομα.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1867
Same family
synonympseudonymeponymhomonymacronym
In a sentence
Ask them for an antonym and you learn whether they know the word at all.
Hot and cold are the antonyms every child gets first.