When a word has two opposite meanings?
A contronym, often referred to as a Janus word or auto-antonym, is a word that evokes contradictory or reverse meanings depending on the context. Specifically, a contronym is a word with a homonym (another word with the same spelling but different meaning) that is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning).
What do you call words that have two different pronunciations?
Such words are called heteronyms (more loosely also homographs, but homographs can also be pronounced the same; they just mean different things). The widest class of heteronyms are words that change their meaning depending on where the stress is placed. In this article, we shall learn about heteronyms that are not of that kind.
Are there any words that sound the same but have different meanings?
Besides synonyms, there are also words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings (homonyms), words that sound the same but are spelled and used differently (homophones) and words that share the same spelling but have different pronunciations and meanings (homographs).
What does it mean when a word is almost a homophone?
It has nothing to do with the spelling, however. It’s a term for the two words, as a pair. Beat [bit] and bit [bɪt] , for example, which differ only in their vowels – tense high front [i] and lax high front [ɪ] — are said to be a Minimal Pair for the two sounds that differ.
Why do some people pronounce the word aunt differently than others?
That’s because the English word originates from the French word for envelope, which favors the latter pronunciation. Some people, especially Southerners, see the word “aunt” and pronounce it no differently than the word’s homonym, “ant.”
