This is a literary term applied to the juxtaposition of two apparently conflicting notions. You may be familiar with the following oxymorons: cheerful pessimist, wise fool, legal murder and bitter sweet. But writers seek new exciting and unsettling...

A figure of speech of semantic abbreviation. A paradoxical connection of two opposite terms within a word or within a phrase, e.g. dry humor (from Lat. humor ‘moisture’), terribly nice. ( also antithesis) figure of...

An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or, more rarely (yet correctly) , oxymora) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms. Oxymoron is a loanword from Greek oxy ("sharp") and moros ("dull"). Thus the word oxymoron is itself an...