Coming up on Word Matters, Uncommon Opposites.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amin Shea, Peter Sakalowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
We all know how to find opposites by removing prefixes.
Unhappy becomes happy.
disagree becomes agree, easy peasy.
But some words resist prefix removal, or at least they try.
I'll point out a few that don't succeed.
Gruntled is a word I grew up with.
My dad used to use it, and actually he still uses the word gruntled.
To be gruntled is to be happy, to be content.
It is emphatically the opposite and noticeably the opposite of disgruntled.
Disgruntled, of course, is the far more common word.
But gruntled is a word that I grew up knowing.
Now, I don't think that my dad probably didn't look it up in the dictionary.
He was using gruntled really as a joke
because disgruntled was the real word and gruntled is just a contrasting term that should,
of course, exist.