Word.ws English Dictionary

antisemantic

antisemantic adjective: based on form or structure rather than meaning. Also the misconstruction of antisemitic.

Adjective

antisemantic (not comparable)

  1. Based on form or structure rather than meaning.
    • As Albert says to Pogo during the poetry contest: "I made it up. I made it rhyme. Now I gotta make it mean something?" While Albert is almost self-consciously taking a Dadaist artistic position during this interchange, it is also true that his antisemantic tendencies are constantly with him.1957, Reuel Denney, The Astonished Muse, page 181
    • To point up Antal's anti-meaning attitude I could still continue recalling quotations: a single one must yet be added here, and this from his work where he tried to outline the distinction between word-declension and word-formation, describing the Hungarian case-system in a strictly antisemantic...1971, Ferenc Kovacs, Linguistic Structures and Linguistic Laws, page 55
  2. Devoid of meaning.
    • Clearly, if the conjunction of realism and antisemantic-realism had the consequence that truth is an accident, that would be a serious problem.2012, B.M. Taylor, Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy, page 96
    • The antisemantic arguments tap into deeply held intuitions that computers are just not the sorts of things one can correctly view as cognitive agents, as persons.2014, Eric Dietrich, Thinking Computers and Virtual Persons, page xi
  3. Hostile to meaning and clear communication; tending to conceal or undermine sense.
    • The event is repressed at the level of direct expression and can only make itself felt again in what Abraham and Torok call the “antisemantic” features of language.2005, Peter Nicholls, “The poetics of opacity: readability and literary form”, in Janet Harbord, Jan Campbell, editors, Psycho-Politics And Cultural Desires, page 151
    • In this chapter, I consider Donald Trump as an 'antisemantic' president and link antisemanticism to broader forms of populism.2022, Stephen Clingman, “Trump the Antisemantic, and the Boundaries of Populism”, in Merle A. Williams, editor, Cultures of Populism: Institutions, Practices and Resistance

Also used as

antisemantic is also the misconstruction of antisemitic.

Examples of antisemantic in a sentence

  • The most striking feature of the distributionalist approach to language is, however, its antisemantic bias, typical especially of Harris but going back to scholars like B.2014, Josef Vachek, Selected Writings in English and General Linguistics, page 69:
  • Later, when William suggests that “the desire for children is hardwired,” Otto goes off on another antisemantic rant: “Hardwired.” You know, that's a term I've really come to loathe!2023, Peter Turchi, (Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before, page 107:

Origin of antisemantic

From anti- + semantic.

Questions about antisemantic

What does antisemantic mean?
Antisemantic means based on form or structure rather than meaning.
How do you use antisemantic in a sentence?
The most striking feature of the distributionalist approach to language is, however, its antisemantic bias, typical especially of Harris but going back to scholars like B.
What part of speech is antisemantic?
Antisemantic is an adjective.

Words near antisemantic in the dictionary

  1. antiseize
  2. antiseizes
  3. antiseizure
  4. antiself
  5. antiselves
  6. antisemantic
  7. antisemetic
  8. antisemite
  9. antisemites
  10. antisemitic
  11. antisemitica

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: antisemantic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “antisemantic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/antisemantic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.