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In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to the fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not the other pair member. For example, something that is long entails that it is not short. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can generally be determined by the question What is the opposite of  X ?

The term antonym (and the related antonymy) has also been commonly used as a term that is synonymous with opposite; however, the term also has other more restricted meanings. One usage has antonym referring to both gradable opposites, such as long : short, and (non-gradable) complementary opposites, such as male : female, while opposites of the types up : down and precede : follow are excluded from the definition.

A third usage (particularly that of the influential Lyons 1968, 1977) defines the term antonym as referring to only gradable opposites (the long : short type) while the other types are referred to with different terms. Therefore, as Crystal (2003) warns, the terms antonymy and antonym should be regarded with care. In this article, the usage of Lyons (1963, 1977) and Cruse (1986, 2004) will be followed where antonym is restricted to gradable opposites and opposite is used as the general term referring to any of the subtypes discussed below.

While objectal opposites are difficult to define it is generally accepted that the disappearance of an object is the closet rather than the lack of physical presence.

General discussion[link]

This section requires expansion.

Opposites are, interestingly, simultaneously different and similar in meaning. Typically, they differ in only one dimension of meaning, but are similar in most other respects, including similarity in grammar and positions of semantic abnormality. Additionally, not all words have an opposite. Some words are non-opposable. For example, animal or plant species have no binary opposites (other than possible gender opposites such as lion/lioness, etc.); the word platypus therefore has no word that stands in opposition to it (hence the unanswerability of What is the opposite of platypus?).

Other words are opposable but have an accidental gap in a given language's lexicon. For example, the word devout lacks a lexical opposite, but it is fairly easy to conceptualize a parameter of devoutness where devout lies at the positive pole with a missing member at the negative pole. Opposites of such words can nevertheless sometimes be formed with the prefixes un- or non-, with varying degrees of naturalness. For example, the word undevout appears in Webster's dictionary of 1828, while the pattern of non-person could conceivably be extended to non-platypus. Conversely, some words appear to be a prefixed form of an opposite, but the opposite term does not exist, such as inept, which appears to be in- + *ept; such a word is known as an unpaired word.

Opposites may be viewed as a special type of incompatibility.^[1] Words that are incompatible create the following type of entailment (where X is a given word and Y is a different word incompatible with word X):^[2]

sentence A is  X   entails  sentence A is not  Y  ^[3]

An example of an incompatible pair of words is cat : dog:

It's a cat  entails  It's not a dog ^[4]

This incompatibility is also found in the opposite pairs fast : slow and stationary : moving, as can be seen below:

It's fast  entails  It's not slow ^[5]

It's stationary  entails  It's not moving

Cruse (2004) identifies some basic characteristics of opposites:

• binarity
• inheritness
• patency

Subtypes[link]

Complementaries[link]

Complementary opposites are pairs that express absolute opposites, like mortal and immortal.

• interactives
• satisfactives
• counteractives

Antonyms (gradable opposites)[link]

For the purposes of this article (see introduction), antonyms, from the Greek anti ("opposite") and onoma ("name") are gradable opposites. Gradable opposites lie at opposite ends of a continuous spectrum of meanings; examples are hot and cold, slow and fast, and fat and skinny. Words may have several different antonyms, depending on the meaning: both long and tall can be antonyms of short.

Though the word antonym was only coined by philologists in the 19th century, such relationships are a fundamental part of a language, in contrast to synonyms, which are a result of history and drawing of fine distinctions, or homonyms, which are mostly etymological accidents or coincidences.

Languages often have ways of creating antonyms as an easy extension of lexicon. For example, English has the prefixes in- and un-, so unreal is the antonym of real and indocile is of docile.

Some planned languages abundantly use such devices to reduce vocabulary multiplication. Esperanto has mal- (compare bona = "good" and malbona = "bad"), Damin has kuri- (tjitjuu "small", kuritjitjuu "large") and Newspeak has un- (as in ungood, "bad").

Directional opposites[link]

• antipodals
• reversives
• converses (or relational opposites)
• pseudo-opposites

• Relational antonyms (Converses) are pairs in which one describes a relationship between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects are reversed, such as parent and child, teacher and student, or buy and sell.

Auto-antonyms[link]

An auto-antonym is a word that can have opposite meanings in different contexts or under separate definitions:

• enjoin (to prohibit, issue injunction; to order, command)
• fast (moving quickly; fixed firmly in place)
• cleave (to split; to adhere)
• sanction (punishment, prohibition ; permission)
• stay (remain in a specific place, postpone; guide direction, movement)

See also[link]

• -onym
• Antithesis
• Litotes
• Relational oppositeness
• Semantic differential
• Thesaurus

Notes[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Crystal, David. (2003). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (5th ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
• Cruse, D. Alan. (1986). Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cruse, D. Alan. (1992). Antonymy revisited: Some thoughts on the relationship between words and concepts. In A. J. Lehrer & E. F. Kittay (Eds.), Frames, fields, and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organization (pp. 289–306). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Cruse, D. Alan. (2002). Paradigmatic relations of exclusion and opposition II: Reversivity. In D. A. Cruse, F. Hundsnurscher, M. Job, & P.-R. Lutzeier (Eds.), Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen: Lexicology: An international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies (Vol. 1, pp. 507–510). Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Cruse, D. Alan. (2004). Meaning in language: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cruse, D. Alan; & Togia, Pagona. (1995). Towards a cognitive model of antonymy. Journal of Lexicology 1, 113-141.
• Davies, M. (2007) ‘The Attraction of Opposites: The ideological function of conventional and created oppositions in the construction of in-groups and out-groups in news texts’, in Jeffries, L., McIntyre, D. and Bousfield, D. (eds) Stylistics and Social Cognition, pp. 79–100.
• Jeffries, L. (2009, forthcoming) Opposition in Discourse: The Construction of Oppositional Meaning London: Continuum.
• Jones, S. (2002), Antonymy: A Corpus-based perspective London and New York: Routledge.
• Lehrer, Adrienne J. (1985). Markedness and antonymy. Journal of Linguistics, 21, 397-421.
• Lehrer, Adrienne J. (2002). Paradigmatic relations of exclusion and opposition I: Gradable antonymy and complementarity. In D. A. Cruse, F. Hundsnurscher, M. Job, & P.-R. Lutzeier (Eds.), Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen: Lexicology: An international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies (Vol. 1, pp. 498–507). Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Lehrer, Adrienne J.; & Lehrer, Keith. (1982). Antonymy. Linguistics and Philosophy, 5, 483-501.
• Lyons, John. (1963). Structural semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lyons, John. (1968). Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lyons, John. (1977). Semantics (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mettinger, Arthur. (1994). Aspects of semantic opposition in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Murphy, M. Lynne. (2003). Semantic relations and the lexicon: Antonymy, synonymy, and other paradigms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Palmer, F. R. (1976). Semantics: A new outline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Saeed, John I. (2003). Semantics (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell

External links[link]

Look up opposite in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Bibliography of Antonymy: English Sources
• Thesaurus.com - also provides for antonyms.
• how to say

Look up opposite in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Opposite may refer to:

• Opposite (semantics), a word that means the opposite of a word
• Botany: "Opposite" is a kind of arrangement of leaves
• Additive inverse, in mathematics, taking the negative ("opposite") of a number
• Opposite category or dual category, in category theory

See also[link]

• Opposition (disambiguation)
• Contrary (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Semantics (from Greek: sēmantiká, neuter plural of sēmantikós)^[1][2] is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata.

Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used to understand human expression through language. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.

The word semantics itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal inquiries, over a long period of time, most notably in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of interpretation of signs or symbols as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.^[3] Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, and proxemics have semantic (meaningful) content, and each has several branches of study. In written language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content; in other forms of language, there is other semantic content.^[3]

The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties.^[4] In philosophy of language, semantics and reference are closely connected. Further related fields include philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of semantics is therefore complex.

Semantics contrasts with syntax, the study of the combinatorics of units of a language (without reference to their meaning), and pragmatics, the study of the relationships between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and the users of the language.^[5]

In international scientific vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology.

Linguistics[link]

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (termed texts). The basic area of study is the meaning of signs, and the study of relations between different linguistic units and compounds: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, paronyms. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics has included the study of sense and denotative reference, truth conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.

Montague grammar[link]

In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in the lexicon in terms of the lambda calculus. In these terms, the syntactic parse of the sentence John ate every bagel would consist of a subject (John) and a predicate (ate every bagel); Montague showed that the meaning of the sentence as a whole could be decomposed into the meanings of its parts and relatively few rules of combination. The logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set of Tarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives is basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 1970s.

Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as:

• Situation semantics (1980s): truth-values are incomplete, they get assigned based on context
• Generative lexicon (1990s): categories (types) are incomplete, and get assigned based on context

Dynamic turn in semantics[link]

In Chomskian linguistics there was no mechanism for the learning of semantic relations, and the nativist view considered all semantic notions as inborn. Thus, even novel concepts were proposed to have been dormant in some sense. This view was also thought unable to address many issues such as metaphor or associative meanings, and semantic change, where meanings within a linguistic community change over time, and qualia or subjective experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model was how perceptual cues are combined in thought, e.g. in mental rotation.^[6]

This view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit that can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is now being fiercely debated in the emerging domain of cognitive linguistics^[7] and also in the non-Fodorian camp in philosophy of language.^[8] The challenge is motivated by:

• factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or anaphora (e.g. this x, him, last week). In these situations context serves as the input, but the interpreted utterance also modifies the context, so it is also the output. Thus, the interpretation is necessarily dynamic and the meaning of sentences is viewed as context change potentials instead of propositions.
• factors external to language, i.e. language is not a set of labels stuck on things, but "a toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way they function rather than their attachments to things."^[8] This view reflects the position of the later Wittgenstein and his famous game example, and is related to the positions of Quine, Davidson, and others.

A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification – meanings are not complete without some elements of context. To take an example of one word, red, its meaning in a phrase such as red book is similar to many other usages, and can be viewed as compositional.^[9] However, the colours implied in phrases such as red wine (very dark), and red hair (coppery), or red soil, or red skin are very different. Indeed, these colours by themselves would not be called red by native speakers. These instances are contrastive, so red wine is so called only in comparison with the other kind of wine (which also is not white for the same reasons). This view goes back to de Saussure:

Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'), avoir peur ('to be afraid') has its particular value only because they stand in contrast with one another. No word has a value that can be identified independently of what else is in its vicinity.^[10]

and may go back to earlier Indian views on language, especially the Nyaya view of words as indicators and not carriers of meaning.^[11]

An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic underspecification can be found in the generative lexicon model of James Pustejovsky, who extends contextual operations (based on type shifting) into the lexicon. Thus meanings are generated on the fly based on finite context.

Prototype theory[link]

Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on prototypes. The work of Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s led to a view that natural categories are not characterizable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but are graded (fuzzy at their boundaries) and inconsistent as to the status of their constituent members.

Systems of categories are not objectively out there in the world but are rooted in people's experience. These categories evolve as learned concepts of the world – meaning is not an objective truth, but a subjective construct, learned from experience, and language arises out of the "grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience".^[12] A corollary of this is that the conceptual categories (i.e. the lexicon) will not be identical for different cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the same culture. This leads to another debate (see the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Eskimo words for snow).

Theories in semantics[link]

Model theoretic semantics[link]

Originates from Montague's work (see above). A highly formalized theory of natural language semantics in which expressions are assigned denotations (meanings) such as individuals, truth values, or functions from one of these to another. The truth of a sentence, and more interestingly, its logical relation to other sentences, is then evaluated relative to a model.

Formal (or truth-conditional) semantics[link]

Pioneered by the philosopher Donald Davidson, another formalized theory, which aims to associate each natural language sentence with a meta-language description of the conditions under which it is true, for example: `Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. The challenge is to arrive at the truth conditions for any sentences from fixed meanings assigned to the individual words and fixed rules for how to combine them. In practice, truth-conditional semantics is similar to model-theoretic semantics; conceptually, however, they differ in that truth-conditional semantics seeks to connect language with statements about the real world (in the form of meta-language statements), rather than with abstract models.

Lexical and conceptual semantics[link]

This theory is an effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them.^[13] With this theory, linguists can better deal with the fact that subtle differences in word meaning correlate with other differences in the syntactic structure that the word appears in.^[13] The way this is gone about is by looking at the internal structure of words.^[14] These small parts that make up the internal structure of words are termed semantic primitives.^[14]

Lexical semantics[link]

A linguistic theory that investigates word meaning. This theory understands that the meaning of a word is fully reflected by its context. Here, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations.^[15] Therefore, a distinction between degrees of participation as well as modes of participation are made.^[15] In order to accomplish this distinction any part of a sentence that bears a meaning and combines with the meanings of other constituents is labeled as a semantic constituent. Semantic constituents that cannot be broken down into more elementary constituents are labeled minimal semantic constituents.^[15]

Computational semantics[link]

Computational semantics is focused on the processing of linguistic meaning. In order to do this concrete algorithms and architectures are described. Within this framework the algorithms and architectures are also analyzed in terms of decidability, time/space complexity, data structures which they require and communication protocols.^[16]

Computer science[link]

In computer science, the term semantics refers to the meaning of languages, as opposed to their form (syntax). According to Euzenat, semantics "provides the rules for interpreting the syntax which do not provide the meaning directly but constrains the possible interpretations of what is declared."^[17] In other words, semantics is about interpretation of an expression. Additionally, the term is applied to certain types of data structures specifically designed and used for representing information content.

Programming languages[link]

The semantics of programming languages and other languages is an important issue and area of study in computer science. Like the syntax of a language, its semantics can be defined exactly.

For instance, the following statements use different syntaxes, but cause the same instructions to be executed:

Generally these operations would all perform an arithmetical addition of 'y' to 'x' and store the result in a variable called 'x'.

Various ways have been developed to describe the semantics of programming languages formally, building on mathematical logic:^[18]

• Operational semantics: The meaning of a construct is specified by the computation it induces when it is executed on a machine. In particular, it is of interest how the effect of a computation is produced.
• Denotational semantics: Meanings are modelled by mathematical objects that represent the effect of executing the constructs. Thus only the effect is of interest, not how it is obtained.
• Axiomatic semantics: Specific properties of the effect of executing the constructs are expressed as assertions. Thus there may be aspects of the executions that are ignored.

Semantic models[link]

Terms such as semantic network and semantic data model are used to describe particular types of data models characterized by the use of directed graphs in which the vertices denote concepts or entities in the world, and the arcs denote relationships between them.

The Semantic Web refers to the extension of the World Wide Web via embedding added semantic metadata, using semantic data modelling techniques such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL).

Psychology[link]

In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning – in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience – while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details – the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they keep, i.e. the relationships among words themselves in a semantic network. The memories may be transferred intergenerationally or isolated in one generation due to a cultural disruption. Different generations may have different experiences at similar points in their own time-lines. This may then create a vertically heterogeneous semantic net for certain words in an otherwise homogeneous culture.^[19] In a network created by people analyzing their understanding of the word (such as Wordnet) the links and decomposition structures of the network are few in number and kind, and include part of, kind of, and similar links. In automated ontologies the links are computed vectors without explicit meaning. Various automated technologies are being developed to compute the meaning of words: latent semantic indexing and support vector machines as well as natural language processing, neural networks and predicate calculus techniques.

Ideasthesia is a rare psychological phenomenon that in certain individuals associates semantic and sensory representations. Activation of a concept (e.g., that of the letter A) evokes sensory-like experiences (e.g., of red color).

See also[link]

Linguistics portal

Linguistics and semiotics[link]

Logic and mathematics[link]

Computer science[link]

Psychology[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Look up semantics in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Semantics

• semanticsarchive.net
• Teaching page for A-level semantics
• Chomsky, Noam; On Referring, Harvard University, 30 October 2007 (video)
• Jackendoff, Ray; Conceptual Semantics, Harvard University, 13 November 2007(video)
• Semantic Systems Biology
• Semantics: an interview with Jerry Fodor, ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8, 2007

George Louis Costanza is a character in the American television sitcom Seinfeld (1989–1998), played by Jason Alexander. He has variously been described as a "short, stocky, slow-witted, bald man" (by Elaine Benes and Costanza himself), "Lord of the Idiots" (by Costanza himself), and as "the greatest sitcom character of all time".^[1][2] He is friends with Jerry Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer, and Elaine Benes. George appears in every episode except for "The Pen" (third season). The character was originally based on Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, but surnamed after Jerry Seinfeld's real-life New York friend, Mike Costanza.

Early life and family[link]

George is the son of Frank Costanza (Jerry Stiller) and Estelle Costanza (Estelle Harris). Though he never made an appearance on the show, George has mentioned twice that he has a brother, but also often says he is an only child. Lloyd Braun was the other son his parents wanted.^[3][4] George's best friend Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) described Frank and Estelle as "psychopaths",^[5] and said in "The Chinese Woman" that, if they had divorced when George was young, he "could have been normal".^[6] George also describes himself as the result of his parents having stayed together.^[7]

In the season four episode "The Junior Mint", he states he grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he went to public school.^[8] In a previous episode he mentions he went to high school on Long Island.^[9] He met Jerry Seinfeld in a gym locker room, and they remained friends from that point on.^[10] George and Jerry both attended John F. Kennedy High School, class of 1971.^[11] During their high school years, George and Jerry frequently hung out at a pizza place called Mario's Pizzas, where George, having the highest score 'GLC', would play Frogger.^[12] George was picked on by his gym teacher Mr. Heyman (Biff Yeager), who intentionally mispronounced his name as "Can't stand ya" and gave him wedgies.^[13]

George has three known cousins: Shelly, who appeared in "The Contest",^[14] George Howarth, and Rhisa, who made an appearance in "The Junk Mail".^[15] George talks to his parents about his family in "The Money", during which it is revealed that he had an "Uncle Moe", who "died a young man" and an "Aunt Baby", who died at the age of 7 of internal problems.^[16] It is also revealed that his mother has a "Cousin Henny".^[16] In "The Doll", it is revealed that Frank Costanza was born in Italy and still has a cousin, Carlo, who lives there.^[17] As of the first-season episode "The Robbery", George had a living grandmother and grandfather whom he had recently visited, though it is never clarified if these were his mother's or his father's parents.^[18]

Personality[link]

George is neurotic, self-loathing, and dominated by his parents. Throughout Seinfeld's first season, George was portrayed as a moderately intelligent character – at one point, he mentions an intellectual interest in the American Civil War and, in some early episodes, appears almost as a mentor to Jerry – but gets less sophisticated, to the point of being too lazy even to read a 90-page book (Breakfast at Tiffany's), preferring to watch the movie adaptation at a stranger's house instead. However, one Chicago Tribune reviewer noted that, despite all of his shortcomings, George is "pretty content with himself".^[19]

George exhibits a number of negative character traits, among them stinginess, selfishness, dishonesty, insecurity, and neurosis. Many of these traits stem from a dysfunctional childhood with his squabbling parents Frank and Estelle, and often form the basis of his involvement in various plots, schemes, and awkward social encounters. Episode plots frequently feature George manufacturing elaborate deceptions at work or in his relationships in order to gain or maintain some small or imagined advantage or (pretend) image of success. He had success in "The Opposite", in which he begins (with Jerry's encouragement) to do the complete opposite of what his instincts tell him to do, which results in him getting a girlfriend and a job with the New York Yankees.

George's occasional impulsive bouts often get him into trouble, such as when he flees a burning kitchen, knocking over several children and an elderly woman in the process, so he could escape first during his girlfriend's son's birthday party in "The Fire". However, there are moments where George exhibits remarkable courage, but usually accidentally, and usually because of inane lies which have brought trouble to George. For instance, in "The Marine Biologist", he goes into the ocean alone to save a beached whale because his girlfriend thinks he is a marine biologist, and even tells her the truth about his occupation after he saves the day. Sadly, this causes her to reject him immediately.

George aligns with both Elaine and Kramer in some episodes, but is also frequently pitted against them. With Elaine, while he does get into arguments with her, they also work together, most notably in the episode "The Cadillac". George and Kramer usually feel awkward around each other, but started working together (and against each other) in episodes "The Busboy", "The Stall", and "The Slicer". "The Susie" is the only episode in which their relationship is as prominent as the relationships between the other characters. Some episodes, such as "The Raincoats", "The Money", "The Doorman", and "The Fusilli Jerry", would suggest that Kramer has a more comfortable rapport with George's parents than with George.

He has an affinity for nice restrooms and lush work facilities. In "The Revenge", he quits his real estate job solely because he is forbidden to use his boss's private bathroom. In "The Busboy", he claims to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the locations of the best bathrooms in the city. When working for the Yankees, he suggested having the bathroom stall doors stretched all the way to the floor (allowing people's legs not to be seen while in the stalls), and, in many episodes, he shows a fascination with toilet paper and its history. He also displays a fear of diseases, such as lupus and cancer. In "The Wife", George gets into trouble for urinating in the shower at a gym but defends his action with, "It's all pipes! What's the difference?"

Although occasionally referred to as dumb by his friends, many signs point to the fact that George is actually quite an intelligent man despite his neurotic behavior. George's foolishness is displayed in the episode, "The Cafe", in which George had to take an IQ test and had Elaine take it for him. Apparently, George's neurotic stupidity would progress until it became one of his primary characteristics. By the season six episode "The Couch", he could not even concentrate enough to read a 90-page book (Breakfast at Tiffany's). In "The Abstinence", it is discovered that George actually has what would appear to be genius-level intelligence, but that he can never access it because his mind is always so completely focused on sex. When circumstances allow him to temporarily remove sex from his mind, he is able to reach his true potential but Elaine, who also swears off sex (in an attempt to increase her boyfriend's IQ) in the same episode, gets dumber.

George and Jerry have been best friends since meeting in high school gym class. The extreme closeness of their friendship is occasionally mistaken for homosexuality. "The Outing" deals with a reporter from a New York University college paper mistaking Jerry and George for a homosexual couple, and, in "The Cartoon", George dates someone whom Kramer insists is merely a "female Jerry". When George is forced to note to himself that the idea of a female Jerry with whom he can have a close personal relationship and also a sexual relationship would be everything he has ever wanted, George, in horror, breaks off his relationship with the woman.

In the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode "Seinfeld", we learn that in the aftermath of their release from prison, George had both gotten married and made millions in the ten years since being locked up in "The Finale". His fortune resulted from selling an iPhone application called the "iToilet", which utilizes GPS technology to direct the user to "acceptable" public restrooms closest to them, wherever they are. In this episode, his wife had left him, and he had lost his money in the recession, having invested it all in Bernie Madoff's now-notorious Ponzi scheme. His wife, however, bailed out her half of the investment after the divorce, before the scheme collapsed. At the end of the episode, George and his wife reunite, though his wife insists he sign a prenuptial agreement, meaning he will have to keep their renewed marriage going to keep him from losing the remainder of the money he made on the iToilet, much to his annoyance.

Development[link]

Seinfeld co-creator Larry David based George largely on himself.^[20][21] Seinfeld and David created the character as a counterpoint to Seinfeld's character.^[22] In the first draft of the show's pilot script, called Stand-Up at the time, George's name was Bennett and he, like Jerry, was a comedian.^[20] In that same draft, the scene in the pilot in which George and Jerry discuss a woman Jerry met earlier, saw George and Jerry discussing their stand-up act.^[20] This idea however, was quickly abandoned and his name was changed to George, the real estate broker instead.^[20] George's last name comes from Michael Costanza, a college classmate of Seinfeld.^[23] "Louis", George's middle name is a homage to Lou Costello, whose 1950s television series The Abbott and Costello Show, inspired Seinfeld's writing style.^[24] During the show's run David was frequently asked why he did not play the character himself, he replied that he was only interested in writing the show, that, not only did he not want to act on the show, but it had never occurred to him and, even if it had, he highly doubted that NBC would've approved of his being cast.^[22]

Casting director Marc Herschfield stated that, during casting for the character, "we saw every actor we could possibly see in Los Angeles", but they could not find the right actor for the part.^[22] Among the auditionees were Nathan Lane, Steve Buscemi, David Alan Grier, Brad Hall and Larry Miller.^[20][25] On April 3, 1989, Herschfield sent a partial script to Jason Alexander, who was in New York City at the time.^[22] Herschfield had met Alexander when he was working on the CBS sitcom E/R.^[22] Alexander enjoyed the script and felt it read like a Woody Allen film; therefore, he did a Woody Allen impression on his audition tape, and bought a pair of glasses to better resemble the character.^[22][26] Though Alexander thought his audition was "a complete waste of time", both David and Seinfeld were impressed; Seinfeld stated "the second we saw him, like two lines out of his mouth, we went 'That's the guy'".^[22] On April 10, 1989 at 9:00 A.M. Alexander did his first official audition and met David and Seinfeld.^[20] While in the waiting room for his final audition, Alexander saw that Larry Miller was also auditioning.^[22] Alexander was aware that Miller and Seinfeld were very good friends, and so figured that he would not get the part. After his final audition he returned to New York City, and when he landed he received a phone call informing him that he was hired.^[22]

Many of George's predicaments were based on David's past real-life experiences. In "The Revenge", for example, when George quits his job in a fury only to realize he has made a mistake, he goes back the next day as if nothing happened; this mirrors David's actions while working as a writer for Saturday Night Live, when he quit and then returned to his job in the same manner.^[22] As the show progressed, Alexander discovered that the character was based on David. As Alexander explains in an interview for the Seinfeld DVD, during an early conversation with David, Alexander questioned a script, saying, "This could never happen to anyone, and even if it did, no human being would react like this." David replied, "What do you mean? This happened to me once, and this is exactly how I reacted!" After that, Alexander changed his performance from an imitation of Woody Allen to what he has called a "shameless imitation of Larry David."

In 1998, Michael Costanza sued the show for US$100,000,000, claiming that he never gave permission for his name to be used and that, because of the character's appearance and behavior, he was not treated with respect.^[27][28] Costanza lost the suit, as the New York Supreme Court (the trial court in the State of New York court system) unanimously decided that Seinfeld and David "did not violate Michael Costanza's privacy rights when they created the character".^[29]

Family and background[link]

Susan[link]

George becomes engaged to Susan Biddle Ross, a wealthy executive at NBC who approved Jerry and George's show-within-a-show sitcom pilot. George and Susan date for a year, during which time the commitment-phobic George is constantly trying to find ways to end their relationship without actually having to initiate the breakup with her. In "The Engagement", he proposes to her in a short-lived bout of midlife crisis, after he and Jerry make a pact to move forward with their lives. When Jerry breaks up with his girlfriend almost immediately thereafter for eating "her peas one at a time" and declares the deal over, George panics and again tries repeatedly to weasel out of his engagement. He gets his wish about two weeks before the wedding in "The Invitations", when he inadvertently causes her death by selecting cheap envelopes for their wedding invitations, not knowing they contained toxic glue. When notified of her death at the hospital, George displays a combination of shock, apathy, and relief (described by the doctor in part two of The Finale as "restrained jubilation"). A few moments after being notified of Susan's passing, he says to Jerry, Kramer, and Elaine, "Well, let's go get some coffee." Susan's parents, recent divorcees, never knowing the specifics behind her poisoning but suspecting that George was somehow involved, never forgive him for this, and they appoint him to the board of directors of the Susan Ross Foundation to keep him trapped under their influence and to ensure that he would never get any of Susan's inheritance.

Relationships[link]

George is very bad at picking up women and his relationships usually end badly.^[30][31] George also dated other women throughout the series:

• His two dates, Maura (who refuses to break up) and Loretta (who will not make love in "The Strongbox"), make it hard for George to break up.
• In "The Cadillac", George dates a celebrity, Marisa Tomei, in the park for a short time and gets punched after revealing that he is engaged.
• In "The Cafe", George dates Monica, who tests George in an IQ test. Apparently, after letting Elaine help him cheat, the end result is the test being spilled with food, and he is left to explain about the mess on the IQ test.
• In "The Nose Job", George dates Audrey, who has a big nose, until he, Jerry, and Elaine are shocked when Kramer suggests that she get a nose job.
• In "The Red Dot", by accident, George dates Evie, a cleaning woman who works at Pendant Publishing by sharing Hennigans.
• In "The Conversion", George willingly converts to the Latvian Orthodox faith for his girlfriend, Sasha, after Elaine mentions that it would be romantic, only to learn after completing the conversion that Sasha is going to Latvia.
• In "The Boyfriend", George dates Carrie, the daughter of his unemployment-office rep, Mrs. Sokol, in order to get an extension on his unemployment.
• In "The Good Samaritan", George commits adultery with a married woman, Robin, after he says "God bless you" to her.
• In "The Outing", George dates Allison, who is having a breakdown. He tries to get out of the relationship by saying he's gay, but it fails.
• In "The Cartoon", George dates Janet, who Kramer openly says looks like Jerry.
• In "The Blood", George dates Tara, and he attempts to add food as a part of their sex life.
• In "The Pez Dispenser" George dates a pianist, Noelle who wishes to break up with George after Elaine laughs during a recital. George has a telephone communication with Noelle and feels like she wishes to break up, so he breaks up with her first. Later at an intervention for an old friend of Elaine and Jerry's, Elaine laughs the laugh that Noelle will never forget and it is revealed she is the one that shattered Noelle's confidence during the recital.
• In "The Fix Up" George refuses a blind date with Cynthia until assured she meets his intellect (low) and attractiveness (high) standards (George: Is there a pinkish hue? Jerry: A pinkish hue? George: Yes, a rosy glow. Jerry: There's a hue. She's got great eyebrows, women kill to have her eyebrows. George: Who cares about eyebrows? Is she sweet? I like sweet. But not too sweet, you could throw up from that.")

In the Curb Your Enthusiasm Seinfeld Reunion, George has married (and divorced) a woman named Amanda in the time in between the finale and the reunion.

Professional life[link]

George's professional life is unstable. He is unable to remain in any job for any great length of time before making an embarrassing blunder and getting fired. Very often, the blunder is lying and trying to cover it up, only to have it all fall apart.

Over the course of the series, he works for a real estate transaction services firm (Rick Bahr Properties), a rest stop supply company (Sanalac), Elaine's company (Pendant Publishing), the New York Yankees (his longest running job), a playground-equipment company (Play Now), an industrial smoothing company (Kruger Industrial Smoothing), and other places. He is fired from his job at Pendant Publishing for having sex with the cleaning woman on his desk in "The Red Dot" (he professes he has always been attracted to cleaning women).

His original job when the series starts is as a real estate agent; he ends up quitting and getting re-hired, but fired immediately afterward for drugging his boss. He always wanted to be an architect; he first desires to be one in "The Stake Out", and he claims in "The Race" that he had designed "the new addition to the Guggenheim". In "The Van Buren Boys", he denies his young protégé a scholarship from the Susan Ross Foundation when the young man decides he no longer wants to be an architect and wants to become a city planner instead. In "The Marine Biologist", Jerry tells a woman whom George wanted to impress that George is a marine biologist. The plan backfires when George is called upon to save a beached whale with a Titleist golf ball in its blowhole. He saves the whale, but the woman tells him off when he confesses that he is not, in fact, a marine biologist: "She told me to go to hell, and I took the bus home."

During the fourth season of the series, George gains experience as a sitcom writer as he helps Jerry to write the pilot for the fictitious show Jerry. While pitching the concept of a "show about nothing" to NBC executives, George dates executive Susan until The Virgin, when she is fired. Following the first and last episode ("The Pilot"), executive Russell's obsession with Elaine has cost George and Jerry a shot at getting a TV series.

According to the Curb Your Enthusiasm Seinfeld Reunion, George has become a multi-millionaire by inventing an iPhone application called "iToilet," which would point the user in the direction of the nearest accessible toilet, wherever they were in the world. He trusted his entire fortune to Bernie Madoff, and after his divorce, lost his half of the money. However, his ex-wife Amanda withdrew her half of the money before the scandal, having been creeped out by a quilted jacket with a popped collar that she spotted Madoff wearing one day, and after she offers to reconcile, he gets it back, but their new prenup agreement means that George will have to be a good husband in order to keep it.

Fashion and hairstyle[link]

George is known for his balding hair, which is not as noticeable in the pilot episode "The Seinfeld Chronicles", but gets thinner as the series progresses. In "The Beard", he begins to wear a toupee, until Elaine throws it out the window out of disgust. He also attempts to restore his hair in "The Tape", when he begins using a Chinese cream that is said to cure baldness. His hair is rarely seen styled. His clothes are usually very plain. He frequently wears jeans. In "The Pilot", George wears sweatpants; Jerry says that this makes George look like he has given up on life. In "The Subway", when his clothes are taken, he goes to the coffee shop with a blanket, causing a bystander to mistake him for a Hindu. In "The Muffin Tops", he steals clothes from a tourist who asks him to watch his suitcase. "The Gum" has him dressed as Henry the Eighth, which, along with a far too small tuxedo in "The Opera", are the only times he is seen entirely apart from his drab attire. George has, however, mentioned that his clothing is color coded based on his mood. In "The Trip", Jerry asks him what mood he is in, and George replies, "Morning mist". Several times throughout the show, George mentions a desire to "drape" himself in velvet (if only it were socially acceptable), which he does in "The Doodle". In the episode "The Bizarro Jerry", George can be seen styling his hair based on an Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) poster.^[32]

Pseudonyms[link]

• Art Vandelay first appears in the episode "The Stake Out", in which George and Jerry need an excuse to give to a woman as to why they are waiting in the lobby of the office building where she worked. Their excuse is that they were meeting Art Vandelay, an importer-exporter who works in the same building, for lunch. In one instance ("The Boyfriend"), George tells the unemployment office he is close to getting a job at "Vandelay Industries," a latex manufacturer. The name is also used as a fake boyfriend of Elaine. Here, Art is an importer/exporter and used as a cover story for when George is going on a date with Marisa Tomei, claiming that George and Elaine are meeting to discuss a problem with her boyfriend so that Susan does not think that George is having an affair ("The Cadillac"). George also uses the pseudonym when interviewing for a job with Elaine's boss in "The Red Dot". When asked which authors he reads, the answer is "Art Vandelay" from New York. In "The Serenity Now", George calls up fake customers, one of whom is "Mr. Vandelay", pretending to get computer orders. In "The Bizarro Jerry", George goes to an office and asks for Mr. Vandelay as part of a setup to approach an attractive secretary. Finally, in "The Puerto Rican Day", George pretends to be Vandelay (along with Jerry as Kel Varnsen and Kramer as Pennypacker) to try to sneak into an open house to watch a Mets game that they had left because the team was getting blown out. In the episode "The Finale", the name of the presiding judge is actually Arthur Vandelay, much to George's amazement. George says he thinks it is "good luck" that that is the judge's name.
• During the seventh season ("The Pool Guy"), George reveals he has two distinct personas, Relationship George and Independent George. Relationship George, he explains, is the conscientious personality he feels forced to adopt in the presence of his fianceé, Susan. Independent George, on the other hand, is the "real" George. Independent George is composed of a subset of personalities, such as Movie George, Coffee Shop George, Liar George, and Bawdy George. Independent George is the George that Jerry knows and grew up with. George worries that if Susan starts socializing with the group, his two worlds will irrevocably collide, resulting in Relationship George "killing" Independent George. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, he declares, "A George divided against itself cannot stand!"
• At one point ("The Maid"), George wants to be known as T-Bone, but his co-workers at Kruger Industrial Smoothing nickname him Koko because of the way he had flailed his arms when demanding the nickname "T-Bone" back from a coworker. George deliberately hires a woman named Coco to work there, only to be nicknamed Gammy instead.
• Biff Loman a character from Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" appears for a reference to George in the episode "The Subway". George is on the way to a job interview and Jerry tells him not to whistle in the elevator like Biff did in the book. After a series of events throughout the episode George arrives at the coffee shop wearing only a bed sheet in a toga like fashion, to which Jerry says, "What happened, Biff? Did you whistle on the elevator?" George is also referred to as Biff in "The Boyfriend" by the daughter of his unemployment agent and both "The Pez Dispenser" and "The Visa" by Jerry.

Reception[link]

George, along with the three other main characters of the show, were ranked sixth on cable television channel Bravo's list of the "100 Greatest TV Characters".^[33] In a list of the "50 Greatest Sidekicks" compiled by Entertainment Weekly, George was placed third behind Robin from the Batman franchise and Ed McMahon, who co-hosted The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson from 1962 to 1992.^[34] On a The Times-Union list of the 50 greatest sitcom characters of all time, George was ranked third, behind Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) from I Love Lucy and Barney Fife (Don Knotts) from The Andy Griffith Show.^[35] TV Guide published a list of the 50 best characters in television history in 1999 on which George was ranked 43rd.^[36] The People called George the greatest television character on a list of the 100 best television characters.^[37] British actor Ricky Gervais and British newspaper The Guardian have both called George "the greatest sitcom character of all time".^[38][39]