Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Festivus (/ ˈ f ɛ s t ɪ v ə s /) is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as an alternative to the perceived pressures and commercialism of the Christmas season.Originally created by author Daniel O'Keefe, Festivus entered popular culture after it was made the focus of the 1997 Seinfeld episode "The Strike", [1] [2] which O'Keefe's son, Dan O'Keefe, co-wrote.
An antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings.
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 [a] as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. A liturgical feast central to Christianity , Christmas preparation begins on the First Sunday of Advent and it is followed by Christmastide , which ...
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1] [2] enantionymy (enantio-means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
A country festival in Swabia Procession in Honor of Isis, a 1903 depiction of the Egyptian Navigium Isidis festival by Frederick Arthur Bridgman. The word "festival" was originally used as an adjective from the late fourteenth century, deriving from Latin via Old French. [6] In Middle English, a "festival dai" was a religious holiday. [7]
When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings depending on context. For example, Spanish dichoso [ 4 ] originally meant "fortunate, blissful" as in tierra dichosa , "fortunate land", but it acquired the ironic and colloquial meaning of "infortunate, bothersome" as in ¡Dichosas moscas ...
Oxymorons are words that communicate contradictions. An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction. As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox.