Oxymoronym - a new word
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007Listening to Anu Garg of Wordsmith.org on KUOW this morning, I was reminded of a word that I coined a while back: oxymoronym. Conflate oxymoron, which means a phrase of two contradictory terms (like “jumbo shrimp” or “pretty ugly”), with the -nym suffix (as in homonym or synonym), and you get oxymoronym, a word whose meaning is the opposite of its presentation (length, pronunciation, etc.). For example, vast or instantaneously.