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What is the difference between paramount and tantamount?

paramount | tantamount |

As adjectives the difference between paramount and tantamount

is that paramount is supreme; highest; chief while tantamount is equivalent in meaning or effect.

As a verb tantamount is

to amount to as much; to be equivalent.

As a noun tantamount is

something which has the same value or amount (as something else). attributive use passing into adjective, below.

paramount

English

Adjective

(-)
  • Supreme; highest; chief.
  • * (Francis Bacon)
    • A traitor paramount .
  • * {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)
    • , chapter=20 citation , passage=The story struck the depressingly familiar note with which true stories ring in the tried ears of experienced policemen.
  • Of the highest importance.

    • Synonyms

    * highest * utmost

    External links

    * * *

    tantamount

    English

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • (obsolete) To amount to as much; to be equivalent.
    • (Jeremy Taylor)

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (obsolete) Something which has the same value or amount (as something else).
  • * 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.

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Equivalent in meaning or effect.
    • It's tantamount to fraud.
    In this view, disagreement and treason are tantamount .
  • * De Quincey
    • the certainty that delay, under these circumstances, was tantamount to ruin
  • * 1981 , Del Martin, Battered Wives (page 90)
    • expecting the woman to take her attacker into physical custody is tantamount to preventing the arrest. If she could handle him, she probably would not need to call the police in the first place.

    Usage notes

    Tantamount is used almost exclusively in the phrase tantamount to , but may also be used by itself.

    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