Meronymy

noun

noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The relationship of being a constituent part or member of something; a system of meronyms. countable, uncountable

    "This relationship of meronymy is controversial for various reasons. First, there are several types of meronymy, such as functional meronymy, where one concept is a functional part of another (e.g. FINGER-HAND) or more general part-whole relations, where the part and the whole exist as a continuous entity (e.g. FLAME-FIRE). Secondly, there are diverging opinions as to whether meronymy should be treated as a semantic primitive in the sense of s[yn]onymy, antonymy, and hyponymy."

  2. 2
    the semantic relation that holds between a part and the whole wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
part to whole relationpartonympartonymy

Example

More examples

"This relationship of meronymy is controversial for various reasons. First, there are several types of meronymy, such as functional meronymy, where one concept is a functional part of another (e.g. FINGER-HAND) or more general part-whole relations, where the part and the whole exist as a continuous entity (e.g. FLAME-FIRE). Secondly, there are diverging opinions as to whether meronymy should be treated as a semantic primitive in the sense of s[yn]onymy, antonymy, and hyponymy."

Etymology

From mero- + -onymy (from Ancient Greek μέρος (méros, “part”) + ὄνομα (ónoma, “name”)); compare meronym.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.