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opposition

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌɒp.əˈzɪʃ.ən//
  • United States//ˌɑ.pəˈzɪʃ.ən//

The action of opposing or of being in conflict.

noun

  1. 1

    The action of opposing or of being in conflict.

    The two politicians are in opposition to the bill.

    The proposal met with strong opposition from local residents.

    That worries the government, which fears that environmental activism could become the foundation for more general political opposition.

  2. 2

    An opposite or contrasting position.

    Near-synonym: oppositeness

    These ideas are in opposition to each other.

  3. 3

    The apparent relative position of two celestial bodies when one is at an angle of 180 degrees from the other as seen from the Earth.

  4. 4

    A political party or movement opposed to the party or government in power.

    leader of the opposition

  5. 5

    In United States intellectual property law, a proceeding in which an interested party seeks to prevent the registration of a trademark or patent.

  6. 6

    A position in which the player on the move must yield with his king allowing his opponent to advance with his own king.

  7. 7

    The difference of quantity or quality between two propositions having the same subject and predicate.

Etymology

From Middle English opposicioun, from Old French oposicion (whence French opposition), from Late Latin oppositiō, translating Ancient Greek ἀντίθεσις (antíthesis), from the past participle stem of classical Latin oppōnō (“to set against”). Equivalent to oppose + -ition.

Forms

plural
oppositions
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).