Learn English – Synonyms, Antonyms, and “Neutralnyms”

antonymssynonymsword-choice

Two words A and B are synonyms if they mean the same thing, and antonyms if they mean opposite things. But is there a word to describe the relationship where A means "neither B nor its opposite"?

For example: "Indifference" means "neither love nor hate".

I would like to be able to use it in sentences of the form:
"What is a `neutralnym' for love?"

(The wikipedia page for the -onym suffix says that "anonym" is already taken, sadly, as this would have been a good neologism. That's why I used "neutralnyms" even though it mixes Latin and Greek roots.)

Edit: A further more example to illustrate what I am asking.

right and wrong are antonyms, and ambiguous is a neutralnym of both.

Best Answer

Word pairs like love and hate, right and wrong are gradable antonyms:

A gradable antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings where the two meanings lie on a continuous spectrum. Temperature is such a continuous spectrum so hot and cold, two meanings on opposite ends of the spectrum, are gradable antonyms. Other examples include: heavy, light; fat, skinny; dark, light; young, old; early, late; empty, full; dull, interesting.

The words you're looking for are midway along the spectrum between gradable antonyms, so medionym would be a good neologism. However, there's another way of looking at this.

Love (in the sense of passion or ambition) is also the opposite of indifference – just in a different direction from the love–hate spectrum. Likewise for right and ambiguous. The words you're talking about are still antonyms, of a special sort that is opposite to both ends of a spectrum. A good name for this would be orthogonal antonym, to reflect that it is “perpendicular” to gradable antonyms.

Related Topic