Word.ws English Dictionary

complementary antonyms

complementary antonyms is the plural of complementary antonym.

Meaning of complementary antonym

Noun

complementary antonym (plural complementary antonyms)

  1. A term whose meaning is the complement of another term, in an either-or fashion, such as mortal in relation to immortal.
  2. One of a pair of words wherein affirmative use of one entails the negative of the other with no gradability.
    • Complementary (also called contradictory) antonyms are those for which the assertion of one entails the negation of the other and vice versa, as in (17).
      a. That integer is even. → That integer is not odd.
      b. That integer is not odd. → That integer is even.2010, M. Lynne Murphy, Lexical Meaning, page 120

Questions about complementary antonyms

What is complementary antonyms the plural of?
Complementary antonyms is the plural of complementary antonym.

Words near complementary antonyms in the dictionary

  1. complementary
  2. complementary allophone
  3. complementary angle
  4. complementary angles
  5. complementary antonym
  6. complementary antonyms
  7. complementary color
  8. complementary colors
  9. complementary colour
  10. complementary colours
  11. complementary distribution

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: complementary antonyms (page history and authors); complementary antonym (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.

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