Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or process of negating.
  • noun A denial, contradiction, or negative statement.
  • noun The opposite or absence of something regarded as actual, positive, or affirmative.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of denying or of negativing; the opposite of the act of affirming.
  • noun A denial; a declaration that something is not, or has not been, or will not be.
  • noun The absence of that which is positive or affirmative; blankness; emptiness.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of denying; assertion of the nonreality or untruthfulness of anything; declaration that something is not, or has not been, or will not be; denial; -- the opposite of affirmation.
  • noun (Logic) Description or definition by denial, exclusion, or exception; statement of what a thing is not, or has not, from which may be inferred what it is or has.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable The act of negating something.
  • noun countable A denial or contradiction.
  • noun logic, countable A proposition which is the contradictory of another proposition and which can be obtained from that other proposition by the appropriately placed addition/insertion of the word "not". (Or, in symbolic logic, by prepending that proposition with the symbol for the logical operator "not".)
  • noun logic The logical operation which obtains such (negated) propositions.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a negative statement; a statement that is a refusal or denial of some other statement
  • noun (logic) a proposition that is true if and only if another proposition is false
  • noun the speech act of negating

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word negation.

Examples

  • Sorry, strictly speaking, the negation is applied to the verb and the verb to the subject.

    Matthew Yglesias » Fight Club 2010

  • The negation of the negation is something like faith revealed as lies (which is why we revile hypocritical priests and pastors so very much).

    Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » Plotting for the Severely Right Brained 2009

  • The traditional objection to double negatives (in English only, given that double negation is common in other languages) is that they can be misinterpreted as positives (“It is not unimportant”).

    “Irregardless” has a posse « Motivated Grammar 2009

  • This final act of negation is a hammer-blow to both Jokla and the reader.

    Archive 2008-02-01 Hal Duncan 2008

  • This final act of negation is a hammer-blow to both Jokla and the reader.

    Patrica Russo's "The Oracle Opens One Eye" Hal Duncan 2008

  • For a human being, this state of negation is the highest state: one must immerse oneself in this nothing, in the eternal tranquillity of the nothing generally, in the substantial in which all determinations cease, where there is no virtue or intelligence, where all movement annuls itself.

    Hegel on Buddhism 2007

  • One can tell that Hegel was inspired by the rangtong view in his use of "highest" to describe emptiness: "For a human being, this state of negation is the highest state" (Religion 254).

    Hegel on Buddhism 2007

  • In addition to predicate denial, in which a predicate F is denied of a subject a, Aristotelian logic allows for narrow-scope predicate term negation, in which a negative predicate not-F is affirmed of a. The relation of predicate denial and predicate term negation to a simple affirmative proposition can be schematized on a generalized square of opposition

    Contradiction Horn, Laurence R. 2006

  • He waved his hand in negation, bowed, smiled, and rode on.

    The Hidden Hand 1888

  • The negation is twofold: He needeth not to offer (1) daily; nor (2) to offer for His own sins also; for He offered

    Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible 1871

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • ¬

    July 31, 2008