First, a homophone is not a communication device for gay people. It’s a word that sounds the same as another word but has a different meaning, such as pail and pale, bail and bale, sail and sale.
There are lots of homophones in the English language, but how many are opposites? I’ve always thought it was remarkable that any existed, such as my favorite example, raised and razed.
With the help of friends and family, they raised the barn in just 2 days, installed windows and doors the next day, and the cows had moved in by the day after.
Due to extensive fire damage, the building was a total loss and they razed it to make room for a shopping mall.
Pretty cool, huh? I doubted any other examples existed, but irishstu and I were just having a discussion and came up with another good pair. Not exactly opposites but close.
This machine is designed for testing ones aural abilities; raise your hand when you hear a ping in the headphones.
My secretary has the most fabulous oral abilities. What she does with her tongue. . .
So the gauntlet has been thrown. Can anyone else come up with similar examples? If not opposites, at least homophones with very different (near opposite) meanings.
This doesn’t quite cut it, as they’re not exactly homophones, but it really confused me when I was a kid:
casual (informal, laid-back, relaxed) vs. casualty (accident, injury, damage; the dead and injured)
(Off-topic: There’s another category of words - those that are opposite in form but have the same meaning: “flammable” vs. “inflammable”; “valuable” vs. “invaluable”.)
[quote=“Chris”]This doesn’t quite cut it, as they’re not exactly homophones, but it really confused me when I was a kid:
casual (informal, laid-back, relaxed) vs. casualty (accident, injury, damage; the dead and injured)
(Off-topic: There’s another category of words - those that are opposite in form but have the same meaning: “flammable” vs. “inflammable”; “valuable” vs. “invaluable”.)[/quote]
And words that have suffixes or prefixes, but no base word to mean the opposite…
to screen (show, e.g., a movie) and screen (hide, e.g., from view)
to trim (remove edges, e.g., a steak or bush) and trim (add edges, e.g., to a dress or tree)
to root (to take root) and to root (pull up by the roots, root out)
Erm… most of these “homophones” that are being suggested are actually spelt the same way as each other. Aren’t they called “homoNYMs”? OK, I guess they’re still technically homophones, but still…
AHD: [quote]One of two or more words, such as night and knight, that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning, origin, and sometimes spelling. [/quote]
Yeah, Aunty Iris has nailed us. But it’s the origin part that actually disqualifies most of my entries. Nevertheless, there are virtually no true antonymic homophones in English, so we might as well allow homonymic antonyms too.
“homonymic antonyms”… now there’s a phrase you don’t hear every day.
Anyway, I was just trying to show off one of the 5 big words I know there (Incidentally, I didn’t know about the origin rule).
Here’s another thing that kind of pisses me off. When I first started teaching homonyms, I was faced with “caught” and “court”. It was hard for me to admit they were homonyms, but yeah, officially speaking, they are (in British English at least).
