Opposite Adjectives: 75+ Antonym Pairs and How Opposites Work

Opposite adjectives are pairs of adjectives with contrary meanings, such as hot and cold, happy and sad, polite and impolite. Grammarians call them antonyms. Below are 76 common pairs, grouped by topic. After the list are the two things that make opposites useful rather than just memorised: the prefixes English uses to build them, and the difference between opposites with a middle (hot, warm, cool, cold) and opposites without one (alive, dead).

76 opposite adjective pairs

Size, shape and amount

Quality and condition

Senses, light and temperature

People: character and feelings

Time, speed and order

That makes 76 pairs. Notice that some adjectives have more than one opposite, depending on meaning: light is the opposite of heavy and of dark; old is the opposite of new (a car) and of young (a person); short is the opposite of tall and of long. Always check which sense you mean.

Making opposites with prefixes

Many adjectives form their opposite with a negative prefix. There is no reliable rule for which prefix a word takes, so learn them with the word, but these patterns help:

A suffix can make opposites too: careful / careless, useful / useless, harmful / harmless.

Two traps. First, a prefix does not always reverse the meaning: inflammable means the same as flammable (easily set on fire), and invaluable means extremely valuable, not worthless. Second, the prefixed opposite can differ in tone from the separate word: unkind is milder than cruel, impolite milder than rude, unhappy often milder than sad.

Opposites with a middle, and opposites without

Some pairs mark the two ends of a scale. You can be between them, and you can be “more” or “less” of each: hot, warm, cool, cold; very cheap, quite expensive. These are gradable adjectives, and saying not hot does not mean cold.

Other pairs split everything into two with nothing in between: alive / dead, open / closed, true / false, present / absent. Here not alive really does mean dead, and very dead only works as a joke.

This matters in writing. With a scale pair, not bad is a real and useful middle (“acceptable”), and English speakers use it constantly as polite understatement: The food wasn’t bad often means it was fairly good. With a two-way pair there is no such middle, so The door isn’t closed simply means it is open.

Using opposite adjectives in sentences

• The first test was easy, but the second was surprisingly difficult.
• He looks calm, though he says he feels anxious before every match.
• The streets are noisy by day and almost silent at night.
• Some of the rules are permanent; others are temporary and will end in May.
• The old bridge is narrow; the new one is twice as wide.
• It was impolite to interrupt, but it wasn’t exactly rude. (two opposites of polite, at different strengths)

Comparing two things is where opposites earn their place. For the grammar of wider, the widest and as wide as, see comparative and superlative adjectives.

Practice

A. Give the opposite.

1. shallow
2. legal
3. responsible
4. generous
5. temporary
6. harmful

B. Which opposite fits?

7. This suitcase is too heavy. Do you have a ______ one? (light / dark)
8. My grandfather is old, but his car is ______. (young / new)
9. The water isn’t hot, but it isn’t cold either. It’s ______. (warm / dead)

Answers: 1. deep; 2. illegal; 3. irresponsible; 4. mean (or stingy, ungenerous); 5. permanent; 6. harmless; 7. light; 8. new; 9. warm.

More on adjectives

Opposite pairs are a good way into the grammar of adjectives as a whole: start with what is an adjective, then descriptive adjectives. For words whose meaning flipped over time (nice once meant foolish), see words that now mean the opposite. For whole word banks of positive and negative words about people, see negative adjectives and describing words.

Checked against Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Spotted an error? Tell us — see our editorial policy.