Tolkien in 1944, who originally used it to describe a sudden or fortuitous event in the plot of a story that turns around the protagonist’s chances or prospects, and brings about the resolution of the narrative. The term was coined by Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. If a catastrophe is a sudden, unpredictable, and devastating event, then an equally sudden or unexpected event of sheer joy or good fortune is a eucatastrophe. If an automaton is a machine capable of moving itself, then the opposite is called a heteromaton-a device that relies solely on external forces for movement. AnonymousĪnonymous literally means “without a name.” Its opposite is onymous, which is typically used to refer to books, legal papers, artworks, musical compositions, and similar documents the authorship of which is known without doubt. If you’re ambilevous, however, you’re equally clumsy using either hand-or, as Noah Webster defined it, “left handed on both sides.” 2. If you’re ambidextrous then you’re equally skillful in using both hands. Some words and phrases, however, do have clear opposite forms, but they’re so rare or unfamiliar that they tend to remain forgotten. This was the case with disgruntled, which derives from an ancient Middle English word, gruntel, meaning “to grumble” or “complain,” which has long since fallen from use-although the gap left by disgruntled has led some dictionaries to list gruntled as a modern-day back-formation.
Words like these tend to come about either when a prefixed or suffixed form of a word is adopted into the language but its root is not, or when the inflected or affixed form of a word survives but its uninflected root form falls out of use. What’s the opposite of disgruntled? Chances are you’re thinking the answer should rightly be gruntled-but is that really a word you recognize? The problem here is that disgruntled, alongside the likes of uncouth, disheveled, distraught, inert, and intrepid, is an example of an unpaired word: a word that looks like it should have an apparently straightforward opposite, but in practice really doesn’t.
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