different between tantalize vs tantamount

English

Etymology

From Tantalus (????????) in Greek mythology, who was condemned to Tartarus in the underworld. There, he had to stand for eternity in water that receded from him when he stooped to drink, beneath fruit trees whose branches were always out of reach.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?tænt?la?z/

Verb

tantalize (third-person singular simple present tantalizes, present participle tantalizing, simple past and past participle tantalized)

1. (transitive) to tease (someone) by offering something desirable but keeping it out of reach
2. (transitive) to bait (someone) by showing something desirable but leaving them unsatisfied

Quotations

• 1880 — John Boyle O'Reilly, Moondyne

  They could not bear to be tantalized nor tortured by the splendid delusion.

• 1884 — Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland, section 22

  All pleasures palled upon me; all sights tantalized and tempted me to outspoken treason, because I could not but compare what I saw in Two Dimensions with what it really was if seen in Three, and could hardly refrain from making my comparisons aloud.

• “It was—simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.”

• 1936 — H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, Ch. IX

  As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass ... we were repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls along our route. ... If we had had more films, we would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming hand-copying was clearly out of the question.

Related terms

• tantalizing

Translations

English

Etymology

From Anglo-Norman tant amount, from amunter, from tant (“as much”) amonter (“to amount to”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?tænt??ma?nt/
• Rhymes: -a?nt

Adjective

tantamount (comparative more tantamount, superlative most tantamount)

1. Equivalent in meaning or effect; amounting to the same thing in practical terms, even if being technically distinct.

   It's tantamount to fraud.

   In this view, disagreement and treason are tantamount.

   • c. 1853, Thomas De Quincey, Autobiographic Sketches

     the certainty that delay, under these circumstances, was tantamount to ruin

Usage notes

• Used almost exclusively in the phrase tantamount to.

Quotations

• 2003, In Bosnia, as in Rwanda, however, passive neutrality was tantamount to complicity with the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" and mass murder — The New Yorker, 3 March 2003

Translations

Verb

tantamount (third-person singular simple present tantamounts, present participle tantamounting, simple past and past participle tantamounted)

1. (obsolete) To amount to as much; to be equivalent.

Noun

tantamount (plural tantamounts)

1. (obsolete) Something which has the same value or amount (as something else). (attributive use passing into adjective, below)
   • 1977, the Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett, page 42:

     For end thereof, not despondency but madness : for when Cossey understood that Hobday had called his wife a tantamount, he waited for him outside, and gave him what he called a pair of clippers over the ear.