Retronym

//ɹəˈtɹəʊ.nɪm//

Synonyms for "retronym"

Ranked by relevance and common usage.

Related word relations

OpenGloss and ConceptNet supply richer edges like generalizations, collocations, and derivations.

8 relation types

More general

1 entries

Related terms

2 entries

coordinate

1 entries

derived

3 entries

derived from

1 entries

has context

1 entries

is a

1 entries

related to

3 entries

Translations

19 translations across 17 languages.

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Bulgarian

1 entries
  • ретроним noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Chinese Mandarin

1 entries
  • 返璞詞 /返璞词 noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Danish

1 entries
  • retronym noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Finnish

1 entries
  • retronyymi noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

French

1 entries
  • rétronyme noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

German

1 entries
  • Retronym noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Greek

1 entries
  • παλινώνυμο, αναβαπτιστής noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Icelandic

1 entries
  • afturvirkt orð noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Italian

1 entries
  • retronimo noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Japanese

2 entries
  • レトロニム noun (A new coinage for an old concept)
  • 再命名 noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Norwegian Bokmål

1 entries
  • retronym noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Norwegian Nynorsk

1 entries
  • retronym noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Polish

1 entries
  • retronim noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Portuguese

2 entries
  • retrónimo noun (A new coinage for an old concept)
  • retrônimo noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Russian

1 entries
  • ретро́ним noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Spanish

1 entries
  • retrónimo noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Swedish

1 entries
  • retronym noun (A new coinage for an old concept)

Sample sentences

2 total sentences available.

Tatoeba + Wiktionary

The phrase is a retronym, the term Frank Mankiewicz has coined to describe names of familiar objects or events that need a modifier to catch up to more modern objects: day baseball and natural turf are in the same category as analog watch.

Source: wiktionary

You can get a good sense of the pace of change over the past century just by looking at the retronyms we've accumulated. New technologies have forced us to come up with terms like steam locomotive, silent movie […]

Source: wiktionary

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