Enough: A Lexical-Semantic Approach

‘Enough’ is a fundamental concept that is as central to the lives of individuals as it is to political policies and debates about sustainability. Yet how much might be considered enough is highly subjective and rarely easy to determine. Uses of the word enough show it to be both polysemous and vague, with shifting, conflicting meanings that are modulated by context and collocation. While its core sense might be ‘as much or many as required’, it is often used negatively to imply ‘too much’ or ‘too little’. Following in the tradition of Raymond Williams’s Keywords, this short paper uses corpus data alongside other evidence to interrogate the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic complexities of enough, and explores its relationship with partial synonyms like sufficient and adequate