antonymssingle-word-requests
A friend of mine was talking about a film he has seen a trailer for and sarcastically heaping superlatives on it. He then wondered what the opposite of superlative (as a noun) is.
I suggested sublative, which I hadn't heard of but made up based on the idea that sub is the opposite of super.
However the definition of sublative is
Having power, or tending, to take away.
So is there a word that is the opposite of superlative (the noun form)?
is a written attack, often but not exclusively ad hominem, that emphasizes the poor quality of the object of the attack.
is a fancy word for the same.
is the same with the expectation of falsehood. They all have the same notion of strong bias by the author that hagiography does.
The antonym of nomad is nonnomad. It is mentioned in dictionary.reference.com also.
Examples from Google Books:
...“fixed abode of the nomad (Beduin), whom death transforms into a permanent settler (nonnomad) (mugim) for all eternity”
The Spiritual Background of Early Islam by M.M. Bravmann
This represented the first time “Uyghur” entered official use to refer to the Türki-speaking nonnomad population of southern Xinjiang.
Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland by S. Frederick Starr
Note: The hyphenated form non-nomad looks like more common based on Google Books result.
Best Answer
I would think that the word superlative would not have an antonym. Rather, the opposite of a superlative for a given adjective would be to use the antonym of that adjective in its corresponding superlative form. For example, the word thick has as its superlative the word thickest. There is no word lesser than the word thick: the adjective is already in its most minimal state. To express the opposite of thickness, one would use the term thin, and its superlative form thinnest. One could say less thick and least thick, but that would be grammatically awkward.