# Are "mother" and "father" antonyms? Tags: terminology, lexical-semantics, lexical-relations - Score: 6 - Views: 4650 - Answers: 3 - Answered: yes - Asked by: exe2013 (63 rep) - Asked: 2013-08-26 - Edited: 2016-09-28 - Site: linguistics ## Question I think that this is not pure antonymy. If it's still antonymy, do linguists have a separate term for this type of semantic relationship? ## Answers ### Answer by robert (score: 5 [ACCEPTED]) Mother is not the antonym of father. They are co-hyponyms because they are both a kind of parent - and parent is the hypernym of mother and father. Antonymy is the relation that holds between parent and child. So by extension the antonym of mother could be said to be child. EDIT: After reading hippietrail's answer, I somewhat changed my opinion. If one considers two words to be antonyms already if just one of their semantic features is replaced with the opposite then mother (female parent) and father (male parent) can be said to be antonyms. However, I feel that it might make sense to reserve antonymy for complete negation or oppositeness, and describe the relation between mother and father as hyponymy. ### Answer by trengch134 (score: 3