Contronym

• Cleave can mean "to cling" or "to split apart".[1][10]
• Clip can mean "attach" or "cut off".[1]
• Dust can mean "to remove dust" (cleaning a house) or "to add dust" (e.g., to dust a cake with powdered sugar).[1][10]
• Fast can mean "without moving; fixed in place", (holding fast, also as in "steadfast"), or "moving quickly".[1][10]
• Obbligato in music can refer to a passage that is either "obligatory" or "optional".[11]
• Oversight and Overlook both can mean "accidental omission or error", or "close scrutiny and control".[12][13]
• Peruse can mean to "consider with attention and in detail" or "look over or through in a casual or cursory manner".[14][15]
• Ravel can mean "to separate" (e.g., threads in cloth) or "to entangle".[16]
• Sanction can mean "approve" or "penalize".
• Table can mean "to discuss a topic at a meeting" (British English) or "to postpone discussion of a topic" (American English).[17]

• The Korean noun 앞(ap) may mean either "future" or "past" (distinguished by context).

• The German verb ausleihen, the Dutch verb lenen, the Polish verb pożyczyć, the Russian verb одолжить (odolžítʹ), the Finnish verb lainata, and the Esperanto verb prunti can mean either "to lend" or "to borrow", with case, pronouns, and mention of persons making the sense clear. The verb stem conveys that "a lending-and-borrowing event is occurring", and the other cues convey who is lending to whom. This makes sense because anytime lending is occurring, borrowing is simultaneously occurring; one cannot happen without the other.
• The Romanian verb a închiria, the French verb louer, the Finnish verb vuokrata[18] and the Spanish alquilar[9] and arrendar[19] mean "to rent" (as the lessee does) as well as "to let" (as the lessor does).
• The Swahili verb kutoa means both "to remove" and "to add".
• The Persian verb چیدن (čidan) means both "to pluck" and "to arrange" (i.e. by putting objects down).
• In Spanish dar (basic meaning "to give"), when applied to lessons or subjects, can mean "to teach", "to take classes" or "to recite", depending on the context.[20] Similarly with the French verb apprendre, which usually means "to learn" but may refer to the action of teaching someone.[21] Dutch leren can mean "to teach" or "to learn".
• The Indonesian verbs menghiraukan and mengacuhkan can mean "to regard" or "to ignore".
• The Indonesian/Malay adjective usah can mean "required" or "discouraged".

• Hindi: कल and Urdu: کل (kal [kəl]) may mean either "yesterday" or "tomorrow" (disambiguated by the verb in the sentence).
• Irish: ar ball can mean "a while ago" or "in a little bit/later on"[22]

• The Italian, Spanish and French cognates (respectively) ospite, huésped and hôte can mean "host" or "guest". The three words derive from the Latin hospes, which also carries both meanings.

• The Latin sinister lit. 'left' meant both "auspicious" and "inauspicious", within the respective Roman and Greek traditions of augury.[23] The negative meaning was carried on into French and ultimately English.[24]
• Latin nimius means "excessive, too much". It maintained this meaning in Spanish nimio, but it was also misinterpreted as "insignificant, without importance".[25][9]
• In Vietnamese, minh means among other things "bright, clear" (from Sino-Vietnamese 明) and "dead, gloomy" (from 冥). Because of this, the name of the dwarf planet Pluto is not adapted from 冥王星 as in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.[26][27][28]
• Spanish dichoso meant originally "blissful, fortunate" as in tierra dichosa, "fortunate land". However it developed an ironic and colloquial meaning "bothersome, unlucky", as in ¡Dichosas moscas!, "Damned flies!".[29]

Seeming contronyms can occur from translation. In Hawaiian, for example, aloha is translated both as "hello" and as "goodbye", but the essential meaning of the word is "love", whether used as a greeting or farewell. The Italian greeting ciao is translated as "hello" or "goodbye" depending on the context; the original meaning was "at your service" (literally "(I'm your) slave").[30]