balance

Questions about balance

What is another word for balance?

Across its 16 senses, balance has 25 distinct synonyms: proportion, proportionality, equilibrium, equipoise, counterbalance, remainder, residual, residue, and others. Each belongs to a specific meaning, listed on this page under the sense it serves.

What is the opposite of balance?

The recorded antonyms are imbalance, unbalance. Opposites are sense-specific too: this page shows which meaning each one is the opposite of, because a word rarely has a single opposite that holds for all of its senses.

Why are the synonyms for balance split into groups?

Because balance carries 16 recorded senses and each has its own set of substitutes. A single flat list would put words from unrelated meanings side by side with nothing to tell them apart, which is exactly how a writer picks the wrong one. The grouping comes from WordNet's synsets, not from an editorial judgement of ours.

Where do the synonyms for balance come from?

From Princeton University's WordNet, a lexical database maintained by lexicographers since 1985. A synonym here means a word form that shares a synset with this word — a set of forms interchangeable in one recorded context. Nothing on this page is generated by a language model.

Other views of balance

• Full entry for balanceAll 16 senses, with examples, usage labels, syllables and pronunciation.
• Rhymes for balanceWords matching from the last stressed vowel onward, grouped by syllable count.
• Thesaurus homeHow WordNet synsets work, and the collections built for synonym work.