"Parting is such sweet sorrow," Juliet tells Romeo from the balcony. Sorrow isn't sweet, yet anyone who has said goodnight to someone they love knows exactly what she means. That pairing is an oxymoron, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as two words or phrases used together that have, or seem to have, opposite meanings.
The word is an example of itself. It comes from the Greek oxys, sharp, and mōros, foolish (through Late Greek oxymōros, "pointedly foolish", in Merriam-Webster's etymology).
Everyday Oxymorons
- bittersweet
- deafening silence
- living dead
- open secret
- alone together
- controlled chaos
- organized mess
- silent scream
- definite maybe
- same difference
- seriously funny
- minor crisis
- working vacation
- paid volunteer
- exact estimate
Two are now ordinary dictionary entries: bittersweet and open secret.
10 Phrases That Only Look Like Oxymorons
These turn up on lists of oxymorons, but none of them contradicts itself once you read the words closely:
- jumbo shrimp: "shrimp" is the animal here, not the word for something small.
- civil war: "civil" means between citizens.
- friendly fire: "friendly" names whose side the fire came from.
- virtual reality: "virtual" means "in effect", not "unreal".
- plastic glasses: "glasses" once named the material, and now it names the thing on your nose, whatever it's made of.
- liquid gas: gas, pressed until it flows.
- freezer burn: damage from cold that looks like a burn.
- found missing: discovered to be absent.
- loyal opposition: a party that opposes the government but not the state.
- random order: an order nobody chose.
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Oxymorons in Shakespeare
Seven of the twelve below come from Romeo and Juliet. Romeo, mooning over Rosaline in the first scene, can barely speak without one.
"Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!"
Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1. Two oxymorons, each the mirror of the other.
"O heavy lightness! serious vanity! / Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!"
Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1, a few lines on. Vanity means frivolity here, so "serious vanity" is as much a clash as "heavy lightness".
"Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! / Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!"
Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1, still the same speech, with four pairs in one line and a fifth in the next; the pile-up is the point, because Romeo is in love with being in love.
"My only love sprung from my only hate!"
Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 5. Juliet learns that the boy she has just met is a Montague.
"Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say good night till it be morrow."
Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2.
"Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical, / Dove-feather’d raven, wolvish-ravening lamb!"
Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 2. Juliet has just heard that Romeo killed her cousin Tybalt, and because she loves him and is horrified by him at once, every oxymoron in the speech is earned.
"A damned saint, an honourable villain!"
Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 2, a few lines later.
"Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / With one auspicious and one dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,"
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2. Claudius explains why he married his brother's widow so soon after the funeral, and the oxymorons do the explaining away.
"Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? / That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow."
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 5, Scene 1. Theseus reads a playbill full of oxymorons and answers with two of his own.
"O happy torment, when my torturer / Doth teach me answers for deliverance!"
The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2. Bassanio, as Portia teases him before he chooses between the three caskets, calls the teasing a torment and is happy to suffer it.
"Better a witty / fool than a foolish wit."
Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Feste, the clown.
"And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:"
Sonnet 1, where the young man is a gentle boor who wastes his beauty by keeping it to himself.
Oxymorons in Poetry
"As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames / No light; but rather darkness visible"
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1. The fire of Hell gives no light, only a darkness you can see.
"that soil may best / Deserve the precious bane."
Paradise Lost, Book 1, on the gold the fallen angels dig out of Hell.
"His honour rooted in dishonour stood, / And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."
Alfred Tennyson, "Lancelot and Elaine", in Idylls of the King. Lancelot's loyalty to Guinevere is a betrayal of Arthur, so his faith is unfaithful.
"It makes a silent music up in heaven,"
Tennyson, "The Last Tournament", also in Idylls of the King.
"Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!"
John Keats, Lamia, in Poems Published in 1820, on the serpent-woman Lamia, who draws the eye and repels it in the same moment, which is exactly what "bitter-sweet" says.
"Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,"
Keats, "Ode to Psyche", in the same book.
"A living death was in each gush of sounds,"
Keats, Hyperion, Book 2.
"Of melancholy merriment, to quote"
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto 8.
"A proud humility, if such there be,"
Don Juan, Canto 15, where Byron flags his own contradiction in the same breath with "if such there be", as if he doubted anyone had met a proud humble man.
"For wordless woman, which is silent thunder."
Don Juan, Canto 6.
"All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born."
From "Easter, 1916" by William Butler Yeats, in Michael Robartes and the Dancer, a poem about the Dublin rising of that year. The line closes three of its four sections.
Oxymorons in Prose
In prose the oxymoron tends to be two words inside an ordinary sentence:
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Economy".
"For I felt as if I could not bear the painful delight of his praise."
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter 64, in the voice of Esther Summerson, the narrator.
"It was a hard matter to preserve the innocent deceit of which they were profoundly unsuspicious."
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book 2, Chapter 24. Darnay hides his trip to Paris to spare his wife and her father.
"then had the young widow had a delicious grief"
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 112.
"threw a dark light on Hester’s state of mind"
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Chapter 14.
"offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky"
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Rochester, on Thornfield.
"for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 15.
"present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,"
King James Bible, Romans 12:1. A sacrifice is killed; this one stays alive.
Oxymoron vs. Paradox
An oxymoron is a pair of words, like "sweet sorrow" or "darkness visible". A paradox is a whole statement that seems to contradict itself and turns out to hold. These famous lines are paradoxes:
- "Fair is foul, and foul is fair:" (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1)
- "I must be cruel, only to be kind:" (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4)
- "All discord, harmony not understood;" (Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man)
- "Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye;" (Emily Dickinson, Poems, Three Series)
Writing Your Own Oxymoron
- Start from a mixed feeling in the scene. Melville's widow, Dickens's Esther and Dorian Gray each feel two things at once. The oxymoron names both in two words, where a sentence of explanation would flatten it.
- Coin the pair; don't borrow it. Melville's "delicious grief" comes out of his scene. "Bittersweet" could come from anywhere.
For other devices with the same list format, see the hyperbole examples and alliteration examples, or the figurative language examples for the full set.
Oxymoron FAQ
How do you pronounce oxymoron?
OK-see-MOR-on.
What's the plural of oxymoron?
Oxymorons. The Greek-style plural, oxymora, is also correct.
