paradoxical

comparative more paradoxical · superlative most paradoxical

1. Having self-contradictory properties.

   It sounds paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that the weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane man.

   1898, H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Book 2, ch 4

   4 more examples

   It is the ambiguity of language only which can make this proposition appear either doubtful or paradoxical. When properly explained and understood, it is almost self-evident.

   1776, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, book II, ch 2

   By some paradoxical evolution rancour and intolerance have been established in the vanguard of primitive Christianity. Mrs. Spoker, in common with many of the stricter disciples of righteousness, was as inclement in demeanour as she was cadaverous in aspect.

   1921, Ben Travers, chapter 4, in A Cuckoo in the Nest, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1925, →OCLC

   It was tightly fitted with a cap of the same substance, and bore engraved figurings of an evidently decorative and possibly symbolic nature - conventional designs which seemed to follow a peculiarly alien, paradoxical, and doubtfully describable system of geometry.

   1933, H. P. Lovecraft, Hazel Heald, Out of the Aeons

   The new civilizationism is a paradoxical combination of “identitarian” Christianity, secularism, philo-Semitism, Islamophobia, and even some elements of liberalism such as support for gender equality and gay rights.

   2017 December 6, Rogers Brubaker, “The New Language of European Populism”, in brubaker.scholar.ss.ucla.edu, page 2

   Synonyms: oxymoronic, self-contradictory