An oxymoron (plural oxymora (greek plural) or, more often, oxymorons)("sharply dull" in Greek) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms. They appear in a range of contexts, from inadvertent errors such as extremely average, to deliberate puns like same difference, to literary oxymorons that have been carefully crafted to reveal a paradox. The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective-noun combination.
For example, the following line from Tennyson's Idylls of the King contains two oxymorons: Less often seen is noun-verb combinations such as the line from Nathan Alterman's Summer Night.