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 opposite. True and false are absolute opposites, with no middle ground. Logically, a statement is either true or false: it cannot be slightly true or rather false. Hot and cold, on the other hand, are opposites 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, so hot and cold are at opposite ends of a continuum, rather than being absolutes.

For many words, such as senile, there is no single word that serves as an opposite, but the phrase in the prime of life does the job. In this book the broadest possible definition has been adopted, giving the maximum amount of information to the user. In some cases, a phrasal opposite is given for a phrasal subentry, e.g. bottle things up as an opposite for let off steam.

The opposites given in this book are not the only possibilities, 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 to choose from. For example, the entry for delete includes:

add, insert.

Both add and insert are entries in their own right and give synonyms such as include, append, and interpolate.