Antonymic substitution¶

antonymic_substitution · word · catalogued

A rewriting in which every substantive word is replaced by its opposite, turning the text inside out while keeping its shape.

Provenance¶

Source: Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (1981)
Attribution: reference — attested in a standard reference rather than traced to an origin
Checkability: source — decidable against the source text it was made from
Attested: codified — formulated as a rule by a tradition rather than declared by an author

Details¶

Kind: both
Languages: en
Requires: tokens, lexicon.antonyms
Deterministic: no

Notes¶

Blocked, and a larger thesaurus will not unblock it. Of Open English WordNet's lemmas, 6,633 have any antonym at all, and only 2 of 11 content words in plain prose have one. "Every substantive word replaced by its opposite" is not satisfiable by ordinary text.

Prompt hint¶

Replace every meaningful word with its opposite and keep the grammar unchanged.