Antonyms are words with opposite meanings. Synonyms are words with the same or similar meaning. A synonym is a word, or in some cases a phrase that has the same meaning as another word with regards to the same language. If the meaning is not exactly the same, the words have very similar meanings in the context.

When two words are synonyms of one another, we call them synonymous words. Let us take the example of the word “jump”. The words leap, bounce, hop are all synonymous to jump, i.e. they have the same (or very similar) meanings.

Now as opposed to a synonym, an antonym is a word whose meaning is exactly opposite to another word, in the same language. It originates from the Greek word “anti” which stands for opposite and “onym” which stands for “name”. For example the antonym for hot is cold, and the antonym for up is down.

Antonyms are actually quite useful in the English language. At times it is easy to understand the meaning and the context of a difficult word, by knowing what the opposite of the word means. Take for example the word “mundane” whose synonym is “humdrum”. The antonym for mundane is “extraordinary” or “imaginative”. Now the word mundane has much better clarity.