Antonyms

What Are Antonyms? (with Examples)

Antonyms are words with opposite meanings.

Examples of Antonyms

A word can have more than one antonym. The following are all antonyms of good: The first point is that good, like many words, can be a noun or an adjective, so its antonyms will be a mix of nouns and adjectives too. The second point is that antonyms do not have to be exact opposites. There are two types of antonyms: antonyms example

Graded Antonyms

Graded antonyms do not have to be opposites of equal weighting. They allow for shades of oppositeness. For example, the following are all antonyms for good:

Complementary Antonyms

Complementary antonyms offer no middle ground. With complementary antonyms, each word only has one antonym. (The reason for that is often a relationship between the two words.) For example:

Adding a Prefix to Form an Antonym

Quite often, an antonym can be made by adding a prefix. For example:

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See Also

What are synonyms? What are nouns? What are adjectives? What are prefixes? Glossary of grammatical terms