'Oxford's great metaphasiarch', as Punch once called him, was seldom guilty of metaphasis, or the transposition of sounds. What he transposed was ideas.
Source: wiktionary
Metaphasis
//məˈtæfəsɪs//
Synonyms for "metaphasis"
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Dr. Ashok suffered from a mild form of metaphasis. He made Spoonerisms.
Source: wiktionary
But couldn’t it be that there is a distinction to be made between ‘metaphasis’ and ‘metathesis’? The OED defines the latter as ‘the interchange of position between sounds or letters in a word’ (my italics). An example would be Old English bridd becoming modern bird. This leaves ‘metaphasis’ free to describe what Spooner did: transpose sounds between different words, like his classic ‘our queer Dean’.
Source: wiktionary
The technical term for this transposition is metaphasis.
Source: wiktionary
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.