Poecilonymy

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The use of several names for the same thing in the same document. uncountable

    "Stated in technical linguistic terms, in this treatise poecilonymy is avoided; e. g., instead of taenia hippocampi in one place, corpus fimbriatum in another, and fimbria in a third, the last is consistently employed and the others given as synonyms."

Example

More examples

"Stated in technical linguistic terms, in this treatise poecilonymy is avoided; e. g., instead of taenia hippocampi in one place, corpus fimbriatum in another, and fimbria in a third, the last is consistently employed and the others given as synonyms."

Etymology

From poecilo- + -onymy.

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