These Extremely Cool Words Mean the Opposite of Themselves

All about the delightful phenomenon of “Janus Words”

They’re called contronyms, antagonyms, auto-antonyms (shudder), and enantiodromes (fun!), but by far the nicest thing they’re called is “Janus Words,” after the (literally) two-faced Roman god Janus, who presided over doorways, gates, and transitions, looking backwards and forwards at the same time — just one of the many gnarly things you can do when you have two faces. Janus Words are words that contain their own negation, which is to say that they are synonyms for their own antonym, which is not really very helpful at all, so I’ll provide a few examples.

The Janus Word that’s cited most frequently is cleave, which can mean both “cling to” and “rend asunder.” You see the former sense in this passage from Genesis about the first man ever to exist being immediately too clingy with a girl he just met:

“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

And you can see the opposite meaning in Shakespeare’s “He would drown the stage with tears, and cleave the general ear with horrid speech” — which is Hamlet being rather too hard on himself, as usual.