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An auto-antonym (sometimes spelled autantonym), or contronym (also spelled contranym), is a word with multiple meanings, one of which is defined as the reverse of one of its other meanings. This phenomenon is called enantiosemy, enantionymy or antilogy.
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An auto-antonym is alternatively called an antagonym, Janus word (after the Roman god), enantiodrome, self-antonym, antilogy, or addad (Arabic, singular didd).
Origins
The terms "autantonym" and "contronym" were coined by Joseph T. Shipley in 1960 and Jack Herring in 1962, respectively. Some pairs of contronyms are true homographs, i.e., distinct words with different etymology which happen to have the same form. For instance cleave "separate" is from Old English clēofan, while cleave "adhere" is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced differently. This is related to false friends, but false friends do not necessarily contradict.
Other contronyms are a form of polysemy, but where a single word acquires different and ultimately opposite senses. For example, sanction — "permit" or "penalize"; bolt (originally from crossbows) — "leave quickly" or "fix"; fast — "moving rapidly" or "unmoving". Many English examples result from nouns being verbed into distinct senses "add
Some contronyms result from differences in national varieties of English. For example, to table a bill means "to put it up for debate" in British English, while it means "to remove it from debate" in American English (where British English would have "shelve").
Often, one sense is more obscure or archaic, increasing the danger of misinterpretation when it does occur; for instance, the King James Bible often uses "let" in the sense of "forbid", a meaning which is now obsolete, except in the legal phrase "without let or hindrance" and in ball games such as tennis, squash, table tennis, and racquetball.
An apocryphal story relates how Charles II (or sometimes Queen Anne) described St Paul's Cathedral (using contemporaneous English) as "awful, pompous, and artificial," with the meaning (rendered in modern English) of "awe-inspiring, majestic, and ingeniously designed."
In addition, various neologisms or other such words contain simultaneous opposing meanings in the same context, rather than alternative meanings depending on context (e.g. coopetition).
In other languages
Auto-antonyms also exist in other languages. For example, in Latin sacer has the double meaning "sacred, holy" and "accursed, infamous", Spanish huésped may mean either "host" or "guest"; the same is true for the Italian and French cognates, ospite and hôte respectively (all three deriving from the Latin hospes). The Romanian verb a închiria means "to rent" as well as "to let". Hindi: कल and Urdu: کل (kal [kəl]) may mean either "yesterday" or "tomorrow" (disambiguated by the verb in the sentence). The Swahili verb kutoa means both "to remove" and "to add". In his Limited Views: Eassays on Ideas and Letters, Qian Zhongshu gave some examples of Chinese auto-antonyms, like "廢" meaning both "to abolish" and "to establish". He named this kind of phenomenon "reverse symbolism"（反象以徵).
Sometimes an apparent opposition of senses comes from presuming the point of view of a different language. In Hawaiian, for example, aloha is translated both as “hello” and as “goodbye”, but the essential meaning of the word is “love”, whether used as a greeting or farewell. The Italian greeting ciao is translated as "hello" or "goodbye" depending on the context; however, the original meaning was “(I'm your) slave”. Latin altus can be translated "high" or "deep" in English, but in Latin had the single meaning "large in the vertical dimension". The difference in English between "high" and "deep" is determined by the speaker's awareness of their relationship to some perceived norm. A mountain is "high" because it is well above sea level, and the ocean is "deep" because it plunges well below it. Both, however, were altus in Latin.
This concept is superficially similar to a few examples in Italian, such as describing accumulated snow as being "high", alta, rather than "deep", but this is because it is considered to be heaped above the reference level of the ground, rather than a throwback to Latin. The adjective, profondo is used instead to describe the idea of depth below a given reference level, so the sea is profondo, along with the vast majority of examples in which "deep" would be used in English. In Italian, alto mare means not "deep sea" but "high sea", with the same meaning as in English of "open water beyond territorial limits". The tide, marea, also follows the same pattern as English, being either "high" or "low", depending on whether it is above or below the mean. However, Italian, French and Spanish all use their own equivalents of "high" to describe cooking pots, frying pans and saucepans which in English would be called "deep". In English, "tall", as a synonym of "high", would only be used to describe a pot when its height is considerably greater than its diameter, and drinking glasses with such proportions are also referred to as "tall" rather than "deep".
Examples
A literary example in the form of an extended prose reflection is Samuel Beckett's "Stirrings Still".