Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Distinction by contrasting or opposing qualities.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Distinction by opposite qualities; direct contrast: generally preceded by in and followed by to.
Wiktionary
- n. Distinction by contrast; the displaying of something, A, to show what B is not.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Distinction by contrast.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a distinction drawn on the basis of contrast
Examples
““Sadly and directly in contradistinction to assimilation theory, the fourth generation differs the most from whites, with a college completion rate of only 6 percent [compared to 35 percent for whites of that era].””
“And, nonetheless, we regularly see him applauded in contradistinction to President Obama.”
The Huffington Post: Kathleen Osborn: 10 Reasons Why Reagan Is Not the Answer
“That goes a long way toward explaining why results for “socialism” and “capitalism” are nearly statistically independent, I had the impression they were being asked in contradistinction to each other.”
“Your definition of Christian, in contradistinction to my second one, goes a long way toward proving what Kamal was getting at.”
“From dime novels and penny dreadfuls through to the pulp boom of the early 20th century which gave us the modern commercial genres of Western, Crime, Romance, Science Fiction and so on, that process continues, with all these genres being defined as “pulp fiction” which by now is intrinsically in contradistinction to “literary fiction”.”
“Sistani, in contradistinction, was happy as pigs in the popcorn.”
“(And then we converts always seem ever afterwards to view Catholicism only in contradistinction to Protestantism.)”
“In its current sense the phrase probably descends from seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterians, “the Covenanters having adopted blue as their color in contradistinction to the royal red.””
“Design is the purposeful arrangement of parts by an intelligent agent in contradistinction to purposeless forces.”
“The general sense is that each order knows itself in contradistinction to what it is not.”
Notes on ''The Abyss of the Past': Psychoanalysis in Schelling's Ages of the World (1815)'
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘contradistinction’.
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cicatrix
scar tissue
minatory, naira, Cluniac, embracive, prolix, hierophant, timorous, adduce, veracious, dysphoric, sang-froid, vitiate and 414 more...
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Literary critical terms
cathexis, catachresis, polyvocal, alterity, liminality, liminal, limn, erasure, metonymic, intertextual, intrapoetic, contradistinction and 66 more...
whichbe This word sounds like a P.C. way to say contradiction. Jul 22, 2008
skipvia PANTHEISM, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary Oct 15, 2007