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Grab Bag for Word Nerds, Part One: That’s So Meta: Words About Words

The words on this list all describe other words: their nature, function, or origin. Learn them and consider yourself a citizen of the word!
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Full list of words from this list:

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  1. acronym
    a word formed from the initial letters of several words
    Printed upon the banner, in letters large enough to be read from the mainland, was the word LIVE—an acronym, obviously, for the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened. The Mysterious Benedict Society
  2. adjective
    a word that expresses an attribute of something
    “The Aeronauts” is the kind of movie that, based on premise alone, you’d like to apply all the positive adjectives associated with hot-air ballooning: soaring, elevated, lofty! Salon (Dec 9, 2019)
  3. adverb
    a word that modifies something other than a noun
    Rutkow is a graceful writer with a penchant for well-placed classical allusions, yet he possesses a distracting literary tic: a heavy reliance on the adverb “finally,” which occasionally occurs twice on the same page. New York Times (Jan 25, 2019)
  4. antonym
    a word that expresses an opposite meaning
    The problems trailing attempts to preserve semantic consistency are clearest for concepts related to the antonyms good and bad. Salon (Jun 2, 2013)
    Other antonyms: accept/reject, abundant/scarce, courage/cowardice.
  5. article
    a determiner indicating the specificity of a noun phrase
    “If the title starts with an article, drop that word, and use the letter from the second word.” Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library
    In this sentence, the characters in Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library are using book titles as clues. They've been instructed to leave out the article from two titles, The Red Pyramid and The Giver. That means they will drop the word the, which is the article that's being used in these titles to indicate the nouns that follow: pyramid and follower.
  6. cognate
    a word deriving from the same root as another word
    The origin of the term "pressing," with its cognates "to press" and "pressed," is not less remarkable than the genesis of the violence it so aptly describes. Hutchinson, J. R. (John Robert)
  7. conjunction
    a function word that serves to conjoin words or phrases
    One of the simplest particles, still in use in modern Greek, is καί, a conjunction meaning “and” and an adverb meaning “even, also, too.” The New Yorker (Jan 7, 2019)
    Other conjunctions: because, although, whereas.
  8. contraction
    a word made by leaving out letters of a word or words
    The contraction—usually two words combined into one, as in don’t or I’m—seldom gets a fair shake from English teachers. Woe Is I
  9. derivation
    the process whereby new words are formed by affixation
    Work it off in local style aboard a Bellyak, a kayak derivation in which paddlers lie on their bellies and use their hands, clad in webbed gloves, to paddle. New York Times (Sep 2, 2019)
  10. eponym
    the name derived from a person (real or imaginary)
    The good names of beef Wellington and Chateaubriand and veal Prince Orloff and so on demonstrate the royalist sympathies of the gastronomic eponym. Slate (Feb 17, 2014)
    Other eponyms: scrooge, guillotine, boycott.
  11. gerund
    a noun formed from a verb
    The Running Dream, The Whipping Boy and The Haunting of Hill House are books that include gerunds in their titles: running, whipping and haunting.
  12. homonym
    a word pronounced or spelled the same with another meaning
    “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is an intentionally worded title, one directly referring to the honor bestowed upon Brienne minutes before the midnight of mankind and figuratively playing with “knight” as a homonym. Salon (Apr 22, 2019)
    Other homonyms: peak/peek, assent/ascent, sight/site.
  13. hyponym
    a word that is more specific than a given word
    Red, green, yellow, blue, and orange are hyponyms for "color."
    Azure, turquoise, denim, and aqua are hyponyms for the color "blue."
  14. interjection
    an abrupt emphatic exclamation expressing emotion
    Lin, 68, no longer performs but exudes the wiry energy of a dancer nonetheless, peppering his speech with dramatic pauses, child-like laughter and whimsical interjections like "Yay!" and "Boom!" Los Angeles Times (Jan 23, 2016)
  15. malapropism
    misuse of a word by confusion with one that sounds similar
    Shaquille O'Neal is an athlete of great statue.
    People commonly mix up statue and stature to form a malapropism such as this example sentence. Shaq is an athlete of great stature (not statue) in two senses of the word: he is very tall but also highly esteemed due to his NBA accomplishments.
  16. metonym
    a word that denotes one thing but refers to a related thing
    It is no accident that the metonym for language is a tongue, not an ear, an eye, or a prehensile thumb. The New Yorker (Aug 1, 2016)
  17. noun
    a content word referring to a person, place, thing or action
    “Distribution” is a noun, and syntactically it belongs with “shipment,” also a noun, as an object of the preposition “for.” The New Yorker (Mar 17, 2017)
    The word noun is a noun, since a word is a thing. More generally, we think of a noun as a person, place, thing, quality, or action.
  18. participle
    a form of the verb used as an adjective
    The passive participle is so often used where we now use the active that ‘brimmed’ may mean ‘brimming’ = full to the brim. Bell, William
  19. preposition
    a word before a noun or pronoun connecting to another word
    One prescriptivist example from English was the long-standing but dubious rule that it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition like “to” or “from.” Slate
  20. pronoun
    a function word that is used in place of a noun
    Numerous languages offer two forms of the pronoun “you,” which are used for informal and formal contexts. Wall Street Journal (Jun 29, 2018)
    Other pronouns: them, himself, our.
  21. pseudonym
    a fake name used to engage in some activity
    Then, in one of the most widely read science journals in the world, she corrected her error: “Helen Lane, it seems, never lived. But Henrietta Lacks did, long protected by the pseudonym Helen Lane.” The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
  22. synonym
    a word that expresses the same or similar meaning
    "Normal" is a synonym for "usual" or "common." New York Times (Nov 28, 2017)
  23. toponym
    the name by which a geographical place is known
    Borrowed from Greek names for cities, Athens in Georgia, Troy in Michigan, and Ithaca in New York are classical toponyms.
  24. verb
    the word class that serves as the predicate of a sentence
    To assess whether the authors claimed any causation, researchers then looked for telltale verbs in each paper’s title and abstract, verbs like “enhance,” “promote,“ “facilitate,” and “strengthen.” Salon (Nov 9, 2019)
Created on 一月 10, 2020 (updated 一月 19, 2020)

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