I’m looking for a verb with the rough meaning of softening someone’s guard, leaving them more open to attack. However, it should be a verb that means to make a target soften their guard. It’s for the name of game ability, in a cycle with similar abilities (all with one-word names). Ideally it would be … Read more
I am looking for the opposite of billable; the context would be “billable hours”. A complete example sentence could be Sorry boss, the work I did from 9 to 10 is “not billable”. While writing a program, I encountered the technical correct, but somewhat ugly billable_true/billable_false-pair. I want to rename the first to “billable”, since … Read more
I already have giant steps / huge strides in the context of ‘Having previously taken tentative, half-hearted baby-steps Sophia began taking ——– towards attaining her life’s ambitions’. Answer Giant strides See Cambridge Dictionary online for examples of usage in this context, generally by British parliamentarians, e.g. ”Is this not a giant stride towards a nationwide … Read more
I am trying to describe a region of a random walk on a graph (don’t worry if you don’t know what it is, visualise it as a physical space, e.g. a park). This graph has a part that if you go there, you cannot leave. I named this part “trapping”. I am trying to find … Read more
I’d suspect that many people would agree with the statement that the antonym of “in” is “out”, except for some peculiar situations perhaps. My natural chain of shower-thoughts led me to the word “within”. The antonym of “within” from many online thesauri is “outside”. This seemed logical to me, but if you consider the relationship … Read more
The word “stronger” means simply having more strength than, however when saying A is stronger than B, it does not imply that B is not strong just that A has more strength (B is strong but A is stronger). Therefore I am looking for the true antonym for this, in that I would like to … Read more
Quite a few web resources claims that sister is an antonyms to word brother. I can agree with this in some way, but how correctly it is. So let say “relative” is synonymous for word brother. In the same time “relative” is synonymous for word sister. It seems like sister and brother in this sense … Read more
For example, if you were to say that something is particular to only one race, you’d say the trait is “race-specific”. So my question is, what is the opposite of this? I would say it’s “race-inspecific”, since that sounds correct to me and “race-unspecific” doesn’t seem to make sense. Neither does “race-nonspecific”. Edit: I think … Read more
If I am uncertain of something and later I made myself certain again, is there a single word to express that? Example: “I was uncertain whether the result was correct. But I re-certained myself by double checking my calculations.” Answer You could use the word reassure, about which the Oxford Dictionaries says reassure VERB Say … Read more
Consider the meaning of the word “fault” as used in the following sentence: It is not your fault that the warehouse burned down. What word could we use in the following sentence: It is not your _____ that you won the lottery. The closest I can think of is: It is not to your credit … Read more
