Metagraphy

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Synonym of transliteration. obsolete, rare, uncountable

    "To represent letters like those of Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, &c., by English characters, is, undoubtedly, a help to the scholar; a help with the special philologist often professes to contemn, but which the comparative philologist often misses. We will call this Metagraphy, or Transliteration."

  2. 2
    metagraphics; hypergraphy countable

    "The rich and free merging of visual arts and literature envisioned by Isou in 1949-1950 under the name of "metagraphy" appeared fertile to many more people than the one proposed earlier with Lettrist painting, left almost unnoticed."

  3. 3
    Symbolism that has no counterpart in speech. uncountable

    "Pilico and Aztec's presence in Spanish ritual, through metagraphy, novelistic speech, and heteroglossia, marks their presence in a dialogue."

Example

More examples

"To represent letters like those of Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, &c., by English characters, is, undoubtedly, a help to the scholar; a help with the special philologist often professes to contemn, but which the comparative philologist often misses. We will call this Metagraphy, or Transliteration."

Etymology

From meta- + -graphy.

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