taxonym

English

Etymology

taxo- +‎ -onym

Noun

taxonym (plural taxonyms)

1. A word used for classification purposes, that is, one that makes up part of a taxonomy; a name or label for a taxon or clade
   • 1971 June, Thomas Neville George, “Systematics in palaeontology: President's anniversary address 1969”, in Journal of the Geological Society, volume 127, number 3, →DOI, pages 226–227:

     If a single phyletic series alone is known it is then covered by a single taxonym (however it may be artificially segmented into subsidiary taxa); but if collateral branches are later found, or reconstructed, or attached by the systematist — branches each one of which includes the ancestor — there is an embarrassment of incompatibles in the taxonomics, for the reason justifying the creation of new taxa at the cladal fork to express the evolutionary divergence is extraneous to the taxonymic unity of any one clade.

   • 1973, Babel - Volumes 19-21, page 195:

     Dialect has by now been used in so many senses that any definition will automatically be too narrow: for what we have here is a pre-scientific, folk taxonym (though a very useful taxonym) that is incapable of precise definition.

   • 2013, Tony Veale, Kurt Feyaerts, Charles Forceville, Creativity and the Agile Mind, →ISBN:

     For instance, Way's DTH would understand the “make-up as Western burqa” metaphor via a dynamically created taxonym like things-women-are-expected-to-wear-in-public, though Way offers no algorithmic basis for the practical workings of such a taxonomy.

   • 2015 January, Wim de Winter, “The Dutch rush: History and Myth of Equisetum trade”, in The Fern gazette‎^[1], volume 20, number 1, British Pteridological Society, pages 28–29:

     Rushes (for making chairs) were imported from the Netherlands into England in large quantities [...]. Inevitably, they were sometimes designated as “Dutch rushes”, an adjective combination that never made it to a taxonym.

2. (semantics) A hyponym that differs only by properties that are highlighted in the corresponding hypernym.
   • 2004, William Croft, D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics, →ISBN, page 149:

     Ash-blonde and strawberry blonde are satisfactory taxonyms of blonde, but they are by no means the optimal subcategories of BLONDE.

   • 2009, William C. Ritchie, Tej K. Bhatia -, The New Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, →ISBN, page 201:

     They conclude that a good taxonym must have as its core a specification of the core of the hyponym.

   • 2013, R. Green, C.A. Bean, Sung Hyon Myaeng, The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, →ISBN, page 15:

     The proposal in connection with taxonymy is that a taxonym must (a) further specify a highlighted feature of the hypernym and (b) must similarly highlight it. From this it will follow that the reason stallion and foal are not good taxonyms of horse, is that they highlight features not highlighted in horse; a similar explanation holds for blonde and woman; likewise, prostitute is not a good taxonym of woman because it highlights profession, but is a good taxonym of sex-worker, because it specifies further and highlights what is highlighted in sex-worker, namely, type of work.

Derived terms

• taxonymic
• taxonymy