Words That Mean Their Own Opposite
English has synonyms, words that mean the same thing, and antonyms, words that mean opposite things. It also has a stranger category: words that are their own opposite.
They’re called contronyms, auto-antonyms, or my favourite, Janus words, after the Roman god of doorways, who had two faces looking in opposite directions. Once you start noticing them, they turn up everywhere.
Dust the furniture and you remove fine particles. Dust a cake with icing sugar and you add them. Left can mean gone (“she left”) or still here (“there’s one left”). Something fast is moving quickly, unless it’s stuck fast, in which case it isn’t moving at all. When a bolt holds a door shut, it’s secured; when a horse bolts, it’s gone. When the stars are out they’ve appeared; when the lights are out, they’ve vanished.
My all-time favourite is cleave, which means both to split apart and to cling together. It’s actually two different Old English verbs that drifted into the same spelling over the centuries, which is a little like two strangers turning up at a party in the same outfit and deciding to share a name.
Most contronyms are harmless because context sorts them out. Nobody confuses dusting a shelf with dusting a cake. But a handful sit right in the middle of professional life, where the context isn’t always as clear as you’d hope.
Sanction is the classic. It can mean to approve something (“the board sanctioned the plan”) or to punish it (“the regulator imposed sanctions”). An email saying a proposal “has been sanctioned” could be very good news or very bad, depending on who wrote it.
Oversight means careful supervision, and also the failure to supervise. “There was an oversight” is either reassurance or confession.
Consult can mean to give advice or to seek it. When a consultant says they’ve consulted widely, it’s not always obvious which direction the wisdom flowed.
Then there are the ones that change meaning across borders, which matter if you work with international colleagues. In Britain and Australia, to table a proposal means to put it on the agenda for discussion. In the United States, it means to set it aside and stop discussing it. I’m told more than one transatlantic meeting has ended with half the room delighted and the other half quietly furious, all over the same verb.
Moot does something similar. A moot point, in traditional usage, is one that’s open for debate. In much of American usage, it’s a point that no longer matters because the question has been settled. So “that’s moot” can mean “let’s discuss it” or “let’s not bother”.
And then there’s literally, which now means both “actually” and “not actually but emphatically”. Dictionaries have recorded the second meaning for a long time, and people who object to it can be found, literally, everywhere.
The practical lesson is a small one. In a quick email or a document read by people from different places, these words can flip on you without anyone noticing. If something important depends on whether a proposal was approved or punished, discussed or shelved, it’s worth using a plainer word. “Approved” can’t be read backwards. Neither can “postponed”.
Can you think of any more? I collect them, and I suspect English has a few hiding that none of us has spotted yet.
