Uploaded by jakej on January 17, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. And here's a chart from Google Ngram Viewer showing their relative frequencies:. There is a mismatch in the antonyms, because we pair starting-point with end-point.
One of the main reasons, is they came in at slightly different times, for different cases, and don't always have a pair. We generally define the starting-point in terms of an action. Something must be done to trigger whatever is started. We generally define the endpoint in terms of an effect; whatever was started at the starting-point will often come to its endpoint itself.
A 19th Century man of ideas they are both from that time would generally cause starting-points, but only observe endpoints. They also come originally from different fields, starting-point being used to describe several endeavours from philosophy to going on a walk while end-point was originally used to describe observed chemical processes at which there was a clearly observed change at some point.
As such, they're really only near-antonyms. But when by extension one wanted to talk of the opposite of an end-point , one used starting-point , and when one wanted to talk of the opposite of a starting-point , one used end-point.
End-point is also more likely to be used closed as endpoint than starting-point is as startingpoint , primarily because closing a compound where the first part is an -ing gerund is unusual. Indeed, of the few cases of startingpoint found in this ngram search, most seem to be OCR errors either missing a space in the open form "starting point" or mus-identifying a hyphen at the end of a line as a soft rather than hard hyphen:.
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An additional clarification - in this context, the opposite of "end" is "the other end". So what would you use to describe the endpoints of a directional line?
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