What is the difference between “flammable” and “inflammable”?
Nothing. Nothing at all! For all intents and purposes, they are the same word.
In my previous article on the word “connote”, I questioned whether there any two English words that carry both the same meaning and the same connotation. I was inclined to believe there wasn’t.
My inclination was wrong. “Flammable” and “inflammable”, which sound like direct opposites, mean precisely the same thing.
A thing is flammable (and inflammable) if it’s something we can set fire to. That’s what the words denote.
So far as I can tell, their flavor, their feeling, their implications also are exactly the same. That’s what they connote.
Word pairs whose denotations and connotations match perfectly are extraordinarily rare in English. But as this example shows, they do exist.
The fact that these two words look and sound like opposites makes the example even more ironic. How is that even possible?
It seems to be sheer coincidence. That telltale syllable “in” often is added in front of a word to flip its meaning. That didn’t happen here.
In this case, a thing is flammable if it can be set aflame. It is inflammable if it can be inflamed (in other words, set aflame). The “in” is pure happenstance.
There are quite a few English words that are literally their own opposites. (That’s another article!) At the moment, however, I can’t think of another pair that sound like opposites but in reality are perfect synonyms.
If you can think of examples, please leave a comment and we’ll explore them.
(This article is part of my series on words that are #worth1000pictures.)
2 responses to “One Word: Flammable / Inflammable”
I like what I read, but how could I tell that those words means the same or mean different?
Great question! The simple answer is that you can’t tell. Not from the sound or spelling, anyway.
That’s my point, in a way. Normally, if you add “in” to the front of a word, it makes the word mean the opposite. If something is “edible”, that means you can eat it. If the same thing is “inedible”, then you cannot eat it. And so forth.
Then along come “flammable” and “inflammable”, meaning the same thing. It seems like “in” should change the meaning, but it does not. And from the words themselves, there is no way to tell. All we can do is look them up in dictionaries and other references sources.
Even native English speakers go crazy trying to keep track of senseless mysteries like this. So I can’t imagine what a headache it must be for anyone to whom English is a later-in-life acquisition.