phantonym
/ˈfæntənɪm/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
1
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A word that appears to mean one thing but actually means something else. Such terms are predisposed toward catachrestic use (including malapropisms) by speakers and writers.
Example Sentences
- "High-school juniors across the country, facing their first Preliminary SAT exams, are engrossed in improving their vocabulary. Here's a thought that might help: A word that means the opposite of another is an antonym; a word that looks as if it means one thing but means quite another could be called a phantonym, and warrants wariness. ¶ Phantonyms pop up in the usage of even so careful a speaker as President Obama. As William Safire noted in March, when the president said that he wanted the American people to have "a fulsome accounting" for his stimulus program, he meant full, whereas to punctilious authorities the word means disgusting, excessive, insincere. […] Likewise, noisome does not mean noisy but smelly, unhealthful. […] Enormity does not mean enormous but great wickedness, a monstrous act."
Etymology
From phant(om) + -onym, with self-aware influence from antonym; Macmillan Dictionary reports that corpus searches have found that the word seems to have been coined several times [probably independently], with several meanings all related to wordplay, accidental gaps, or catachresis, as long ago as 1993 (by Irwin M. Berent, referring to comical neologisms such as bebig, analogous to embiggen) and most recently in 2009, by Jack Rosenthal, as an -onym term for words whose sound or appearance makes them liable to be used catachrestically.