I found the use of "visible and invisible" as contronyms a bit hard to accept. Not particularly useful as the number of such pairs would be so large. While searching on Internet, I found a new site that I think might interest many members:
http://rinkworks.com/words/linguistics.shtml It gives many useful definitions. I hope it is new.

bill, my reading of the 'contronym' entry was that visible and invisible were used to show the contronymity of "out", and not that these words were themselves contronyms. in fact, a contronym is one word not two (which is why his using cleave as an example of a contronym reeks of bogosity!!).

Ok, I know I haven't lost my mind on this one. I actually looked to see if somehow my screen had come up on page 2 of the thread. Where, please, was this use of the words 'visible' and 'invisible', 'out', and 'contronym' for that matter, gentlemen?

Dear Jackie: Tsuwm and I are talking about the last "Today's Word".


Dear tsuwm: My vision is not very good, but when a light is out, it is not invisible to me until it is over a hundred yards awy. I just feel that bit was not up to Wordsmith's standard.

I suppose you could say when the moon is out, we see its light. When a light bulb is out, we see no light from it. And our saying a light is "out" is a carry-over from days of candles and lamps. I think we now more often say a light is "off" referring to action of switch.