This weeks quiz is from Oxford Word Blog.
There are plenty of words which come in pairs, as it were, so that knowing the definition of one will almost certainly mean you know the definition of the other.
The prefixes in-, un-, dis-, de-, and irr- often clue in the wordsmith to a verb or adjective which simply means the opposite of its complementary verb or adjective.
You might assume that the ‘positive’ verb or adjective precedes its opposite. One must do before one can undo, surely? Well, not always.
Click here to take the quiz and see if you can beat my score of 9 out of 10, which I obtained by guessing on every question. For each pair, I just picked the word I was more familiar with.
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Aaargh! I was doing so well (8/8) using your technique when my iPad decided it had had too much and reloaded the page. Tried again, it happened after 3. So I’ll never know what the last two are, I give up. I was interested that gruntled was formed in the 1930s though, I had thought that was a more modern tongue-in-cheek usage.
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Anabel, I’m pretty sure you would have gotten the last 2 correct for a perfect score. I did the quiz again and got the same one wrong. The last two were inept / ept & indistinct /distinct.
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I would go for distinct and inept being the older ones.
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Ick…I got 60% so it seems I am in keeping with my average grade throughout my school-life:) I found it interesting how some did not come into “being” until the 20th century
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Brigit, I agree. You’d think it wouldn’t take 300 years for the part of the word without the “in” to come into usage.
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80%. Not bad. I got tripped up with the whole prefix thing. Mostly, I assumed the prefixed word came later, which many times it did not.
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60%. All guesses, of course. I’m good at History and English, but not the history of English so much.
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Thanks to everyone who played along and commented.
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