Antonymi

Antonymi is the term often used to refer to antonyms—words that express opposite meanings. The underlying concept comes from the Greek roots anti- “opposite” and onoma “name” or word. In English, the plural is antonyms, while antonymi is encountered in discussions of how the concept is rendered in other languages. Antonymi denote a semantic relationship between lexical items, not a single word’s inherent property.

Antonymi are typically categorized into three main types. Complementary (binary) antonyms describe states with no intermediate value, such as dead/alive or present/absent. Gradable antonyms fall along a scale, like hot/cold or large/small, where intermediate degrees exist. Relational antonyms express opposite roles within a relation, such as teacher/student or buy/sell, where the terms define opposing perspectives rather than opposite properties.

The existence and nature of antonymi can be sense-dependent. A word may have multiple antonyms across different senses, and some pairs are not strict opposites in every context. Cultural and linguistic factors influence which pairs are considered antonymi in a given language. Antonymi play a key role in vocabulary study, lexical semantics, and natural language processing, where identifying opposites can aid in word sense disambiguation, paraphrase detection, and semantic similarity judgments.

See also: synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms, semantic relations, negation, lexical semantics.