metonymy
/mɪˈtɑnəmi/noun
metonymy is spelled M-E-T-O-N-Y-M-Y. The wrong spelling people search most is metonomy: about 120 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 15 of all searches for the word. Metonymy is a noun meaning “The use of a single characteristic or part of an object, concept or phenomenon to identify the entire object…”. The plural of metonymy is metonymies.
How do you spell metonymy?
Metonymy is spelled M-E-T-O-N-Y-M-Y. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 15 of the searches for metonymy in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
What does metonymy mean?
noun
- 1
The use of a single characteristic or part of an object, concept or phenomenon to identify the entire object, concept, phenomenon or a related object.
- 2
A metonym.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce metonymy?
- US /mɪˈtɑnəmi/
- UK /mɪˈtɒnəmi/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_(NaomiAmethyst)-metonymy.wav, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vininn126-metonymy.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of metonymy
- metonymies plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is metonymy?
Metonymy appears about once in every 19 million words in written English, the 131,834th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you abbreviate metonymy?
Wiktionary records one abbreviation of metonymy: meton..
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Metonymy in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense figure of speech:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does metonymy come from?
From Late Latin metonymia, from Ancient Greek μετωνυμίᾱ (metōnumíā, “change of name”), from μετά (metá, “other”) + ὄνομα (ónoma, “name”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).