metonymic

English

WOTD – 16 April 2010

Etymology

From Ancient Greek μετωνυμικός (metōnumikós, “of or like metonymy”), from μετωνυμία (metōnumía, “change of name”), from μετά (metá, “other”) + ὄνυμα (ónuma, “name”).

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /ˌmɛt.əˈnɪm.ɪk/

  • Audio (Southern England)

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Adjective

metonymic (comparative more metonymic, superlative most metonymic)

1. Of, or relating to, a word or phrase that names an object from a single characteristic of it or of a closely related object.

   Synonyms: metonymical, metonymous

   The British government is often referred to by the metonymic expression "Downing Street".

   • 1999, Udo Hahn, Katja Markert, “On the Formal Distinction between Literal and Figurative Language”, in Progress in Artificial Intelligence: 9th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, page 140:

     With a metonymic expression encountered in almost every sixth utterance, an uncontroversial need for dealing with this problem is demonstrated.

   • 2006, Jon Patrick, “Metonymic and holonymic roles and emergent properties in the SNOMED CT ontology”, in AOW Proceedings‎^[1], volume 72: Australasian Ontology Workshop: AOW '06: proceedings of the second Australasian workshop on advances in ontologies, 2006, pages 61–67:

     We investigate this replacement for a proper aggregation hierarchy and argue that it comes from a misunderstanding of both the linguistic use of terminology at the point of clinical care and the logic arguments developed for its justification. In particular in SCT [SNOMED CT] the holonymic (or hypernym) role of an aggregating concept is used as a source of inheritance which is clearly incorrect. Our explanation for this SCT modelling strategy is that the role of such a holonym has undergone the process of metonymic substitution, which is substitution of the authentic word for one that serves as a metaphor for the original. The assignment of attributes and relations of the meronymic (sub-part) members of the holonym (super-part) to be one of the holonym itself can at best be called metonymic inheritance. Importantly, if it is allowed to operate at all, it must operate from the bottom up, that is the attributes move from the part to the whole, that is, in reverse to what we normally think of as the direction of inheritance, from the top down.

Derived terms

• metonymically

Related terms

• metonymy, metonym

Translations

of, or relating to, a word that names an object from a single characteristic of it or of a closely related object

• Catalan: metonímic
• Danish: metonymisk
• Finnish: metonyyminen (fi)
• French: métonymique (fr)
• Greek: μετωνυμικός (el) (metonymikós)
• Irish: meatonaimeach
• Italian: metonimico (it)
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: metonymisk

  Nynorsk: metonymisk

• Russian: метоними́ческий (ru) (metonimíčeskij)
• Spanish: metonímico (es)
• Swedish: metonymisk (sv)

Noun

metonymic (plural metonymics)

1. Synonym of metonym, an instance of metonymy.