English has a range of words for every user with different shades of meaning to suit all levels of experience. Big can be called large, immense, huge, vast, massive, whopping or enormous, depending upon the shades of meaning required and the person or thing to be described. ‘Horizontally challenged’ has also jumped upon the bandwagon to correct matters politically. All this variety gives English the quality of polysemy, a quality reflected in many ways through the vocabulary.

One peculiar instance of this polysemy is the verbosity of figurative expression that is a pitfall for any learner. Many expressions in English say the same thing twice, for example, vim and vigour, null and void, kith and kin, safe and sound and hale and hearty.

Another special case is that of contronyms. A contronym is a word that carries contradictory meanings. You can cleave a piece of meat in two and you can also describe how two people always cleave together. A fast car moves quickly but a door is stuck fast if it does not open. A bolted door is secure but a bolted horse has run away to freedom. Trying your bets goes in your favour but if you are a trying person, you can’t get worse! To finish a meeting one winds it up, to start a watch one winds it up as well.

How did English acquire such lists of words? The ways are manifold and quite mysterious. One such way creates ghost words; these are words that owe their existence to typographical errors or misunderstanding. For instance, Shakespeare thought illustrious was the opposite of lustrous and for some time gave lustrous a sense that was not the original one.

According to the First Supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary, at least 350 words are ghost words. English also adopts words regularly from other languages, often when a corresponding word might already be in existence. For instance, there are nouns like water, moon, mouth and town but English, instead of creating adjectives like townly, went in for words aquatic, lunar, oral and urban from other languages.