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stranger
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OP
stranger
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This morning on my drive to work I struggled to think of a one word antonym for the word "soon." I've exhausted all of the online antonym search sites to no avail. I know this has to be an easy one, but I'm stumped...
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Unix: Where /sbin/init is still Job 1
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Unix: Where /sbin/init is still Job 1
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Joined: Mar 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
'Presently' and 'later' jumped to mind at first.
Checked thesaurus, found 'subsequently' and 'latterly'.
Hope these help.
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Joined: Mar 2000
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stranger
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stranger
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My first thoughts were: presently or without delay
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Joined: Apr 2000
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stranger
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stranger
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Antonym for "soon" would be "later"...as in "I'll do it soon, but you can do it later."
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journeyman
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journeyman
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I suppose that 'never' could be consider an antonym, although, in practice, it is often a synonym.
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Joined: Mar 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Re-read your question, and now I'm thinking my initial
reponse was off the mark. In mathematical terms, were you thinking of 'soon' being like a positive number, and 'now' being zero, and therefore the antonym you're searching for would correspond to a negative number?
If so, what about "recently"? Jackie
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Joined: Apr 2000
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Apr 2000
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If you treat "soon" as an adverb (as in "It will happen soon"), the closest I can come to an antonym would be something like "eventually", "sometime", "someday", or even "never".
[P.]
[P.]
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
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Hi,
Why should every word have an antonym, especially a vague one like "soon", which evokes a vast stretch of desert? You could just as well ask for the opposite of "perhaps" - (oh no, it's not "certainly"). Some words seem to be used frequently just because they have no straightforward opposite. This makes contradiction more difficult. What do you think of that?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Have I got the deal for you! here's an intensifier for the all too vague 'soon', and it's an acronym to boot: RSN [Real Soon Now] 1. Supposed to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical. 2. When one's gods, fates, or other time commitments permit one to get to it (in other words, don't hold your breath). http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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Joined: Mar 2000
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
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Thank you, tsuwm,
Yet my bill is pretty well filled with "ASAP", which occurs in every other mail on our company intranet..
I meant that the vagueness is actually an asset of "soon". In the meantime it occurred to me that such words could be called "half-way words", and that they typically have TWO antonyms, like "never" and "presently" in this case.
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