Oxymoron

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Oxymorons appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as ground pilot and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective-noun combination of two words. For example, the following line fromTennyson's Idylls of the King contains two oxymora:

"And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."

Other examples of oxymora of this kind are:

• Dark light

• Living dead

• Open secret

• Original copy