juxtaposition

• juxta-position

From French juxtaposition, from Latin iuxtā (“near”) (from Latin iungō (“to join”)) + French position (“position”) (from Latin pōnō (“to place”)).

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /ˌd͡ʒʌk.stə.pəˈzɪʃ.ən/

• Audio (US):

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juxtaposition (countable and uncountable, plural juxtapositions)

1. The nearness of objects with little or no delimiter.
   • 1809, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend:

     It is the object of the mechanical atomistic philosophy to confound synthesis with synartesis, or rather with mere juxtaposition of corpuscles separated by invisible interspaces.

   1. (grammar) An absence of linking elements in a group of words that are listed together.

      Example: mother father instead of mother and father

   2. (mathematics) An absence of operators in an expression.

      Using juxtaposition for multiplication saves space when writing longer expressions. ${\displaystyle a\times b}$ collapses to ${\displaystyle ab}$.

      • 2007, Lawrence Moss, Hans-Jörg Tiede, “Applications of Modal Logic in Linguistics”, in P. Blackburn et al., editors, Handbook of Modal Logic, Elsevier, page 1054:

        A fundamental operation on strings is string concatenation which we will denote by juxtaposition.

2. The extra emphasis given to a comparison when the contrasted objects are close together.

   There was a poignant juxtaposition between the boys laughing in the street and the girl crying on the balcony above.

   1. (art) Two or more contrasting sounds, colours, styles etc. placed together for stylistic effect.

      The juxtaposition of the bright yellows on the dark background made the painting appear three dimensional.

      • 2001, Dean R. Koontz, One Door Away from Heaven, Random House, →ISBN, page 497:

        Her mother favored a multiyear project: obscenities carved in intricate and clever juxtapositions, descending every finger, curling in lettered whorls across the palm, fanning in offensive rays across the opisthenar, which is the name for the back of the hand, a word that Leilani knew because she had studied the structure of the human hand in detail, the better to understand her difference.

   2. (rhetoric) The close placement of two ideas to imply a link that may not exist.

      Example: In 1965 the government was elected; in 1965 the economy took a dive.

• position (structurally)

juxtaposition (third-person singular simple present juxtapositions, present participle juxtapositioning, simple past and past participle juxtapositioned)

1. To place in juxtaposition.

• parataxis

• Juxtaposition on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• DeLone et. al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. →ISBN. Music.

• IPA^(key): /ʒyk.sta.po.zi.sjɔ̃/

• Audio:

  (file)

juxtaposition f (plural juxtapositions)

1. juxtaposition

• “juxtaposition”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé , 2012.