Word of the day: outgoing

What is an Antonym anyway?

Antonyms: Find Opposite Words & Examples

Two words that have contrary meanings are said to be antonymous.

While synonyms multiplied because England was invaded by different cultures, antonyms grew out of a primal human need to categorize the world through contrast. In fact, our brains process opposites faster and store them closer together in our mental dictionaries than synonyms. Because of this deep psychological link, many of our oldest antonym pairs, like "fast" and "slow," or "black" and "white," share a single, ancient Proto-Indo-European root word. It turns out that in the history of English, opposites didn't just attract; they were born from the exact same linguistic DNA.

New features:

Example sentences and example quotes

We looked at five million documents to find unique example sentences. We also explored books to find example quotes with each word.

The Synonym.com Word Unscrambler

We have used a common open-souce word list to help you unscramble letters to find words that contain those letters. Our word unscrambler wil let you find words that either start or end with from 3 to 28 characters and is optimized for mobile devices and slow internet connections.

Pronunciation, Spelling, and Etymology

Alongside each word is an audio icon. When pressed, a voice will pronounce the word. English spelling is often difficult to discern whether letters are silent, so we display the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) alongside each word. If you are learning english as a second language, we recommend you familiarize yourself with the alphabet. English is one of the few languages where spelling contests are held, because vocalizing a word and understanding the word etymology are merely hints to how an english word is spelled.

We offer a separate tab with etymology because we know you most need a synonym or an antonym for a particular word. But if spelling bees are in your future, then the etymology of a word will help you understand the likely spelling.

Learning new vocabulary

We also offer a learning vocabulary system based on the science of learning. You swipe a card to the right if you know the meaning of the word. If you are unsure about a word's meaning, you can tap or click the card to see the meaning, then swipe the card to the left to review the word again in the deck.

If you are studying for the vocabulary portion of an exam, our vocabulary study game is the way to go. Personally, I passed many a vocab exam using this method. It works!

Word Games: The Sea Scrambler and WORDTIGO

To play WORDTIGO you move to rotate the antonyms into the target before they enter the center circle. A thumbs-up is shown if you are correct and a thumbs-down if you are not correct. As you accumulate points, the words enter the center circle at a faster pace. The game gets hard quickly.

To play The Sea Scrambler I would suggest cheating with our Word Unscrambler. You will be given a certain number of letters and asked to create words to fill out the puzzle.