A synonym is a word which has the same meaning as another word. For example, happy is a synonym for words like joyful and cheery.
The origin of the term synonym itself lies in the Ancient Greek Doric dialectal form onyma “name”, plus the prefix syn “with/co-”.
An antonym is a word whose meaning is the opposite to that of another word. This technical term derives, again, from Ancient Greek onyma, together with anti “against”. Everyday examples of antonyms are: good and bad, hot and cold, wrong and right.
A hyponym is a word whose meaning is included in the meaning of another word. The term derives from Ancient Greek onyma preceded by hypo “under”. Examples are the words scarlet and crimson as hyponyms of the colour red; and crow, seagull and sparrow as hyponyms of bird.
A contronym (or contranym), also known as an auto-antonym, represents a much more puzzling phenomenon. This term signifies a word which has two meanings, with one being the opposite of the other.
A good example is the noun peer, which can mean “a person who is a member of the nobility”, but can also mean “an equal”, as in the often-used phrase “peer group”.
A less common example is provided by the verb to cleave, which means “to split, separate, or divide”, as in Shakespeare’s line “To cleave a heart in twain”, from his 1603 play Measure for Measure. But it can also mean “to adhere closely together”, as in “water in small quantity cleaves to any thing that is solid”, from the 1626 writings of Shakespeare’s almost exact contemporary, the English philosopher, scientist and statesman, Francis Bacon (they were born within a few months of each other).
Another clear example of a contronym is the verb to sanction. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this can mean “to impose sanctions upon (a person), to penalise them”. But also according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has the additional meaning of “to permit authoritatively; to authorise”, as in Macaulay’s 1897 “the Directors were not disposed to sanction any increase of the salaries out of their own treasury”. So sanction can mean either “to allow” or “to not allow”.
But how can languages function effectively if they contain words which have two entirely opposite meanings? Surely that way lies confusion?
Languages are enormously complex, rich and flexible systems which are actually very good at taking care of themselves. And language users are very adept at working out what is meant from context. It has to be said, too, that the verb to cleave is used only very infrequently in our contemporary language, perhaps precisely because of the possibilities it opens up of creating confusion.
And we do have some idea of how English came to have a verb to cleave which carries the two contradictory meanings “split apart” and “stick together”. It is because this particular word subsumes two originally different verbs which now happen to sound the same. Old English, the ancestor of Modern English, which was spoken and written before approximately 1100AD, had two different verbs – clífan “to adhere” and clifian “to split” – which have jointly morphed into the same pronunciation “cleave” and come to be treated as a single verb in the modern language.
CLEAVAGE
The verb cleave gives us the noun cleavage, whose most common meaning nowadays is probably “the cleft between a woman’s breasts as revealed by a low-cut décolletage”, where the French word décolletage means “of a woman’s dress, cut low round the neck”, from décoller “to take off”. (Décollage means “take off” as of an aeroplane.)
