What's a word that describes synonyms and antonyms together?
March 31, 2014 5:27 PM   Subscribe

Asking for a friend. Said friend is: A) Tired of writing "synonyms and antonyms" over and over B) Trying to shorten the paper she's writing that contains this phrase.

She asked me if I knew what, if any, category of word might contain them.

My own search has yielded me nothing, except maybe "Semantic relations", which really isn't appreciably shorter, and might not be totally complete or accurate, and "-onyms", which is plenty short, but over-inclusive, and maybe too informal.

I suppose I may have to put up the hat signal.
posted by Mister Moofoo to Writing & Language (4 answers total)
 
I think lexical relations or semantic relations would be the term.
posted by Jairus at 5:32 PM on March 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yeah, lexical/semantic relations -- although that's actually a broader category, since it also includes things like hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, etc.
posted by zeri at 5:58 PM on March 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Would it be inappropriate to establish an acronym early on, and explain that she'll be referring to them that way moving forward? E.g., "This is a paper about synonyms and antonyms (SAs). SAs are words that blah blah blah..."or even, "This is a paper about synonyms and antonyms, which I will refer to as SAs for the sake of convenience and ease of reading here." Sorry for the overly simple sentences, but hopefully you see what I mean.
posted by juliplease at 6:04 PM on March 31, 2014 [5 favorites]


This is exactly the sticky kind of situation portmanteaus were born to solve.

You want "syntonyms."
posted by thisclickableme at 4:42 PM on April 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


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