metonymy
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 22, 2025 is:
metonymy \muh-TAH-nuh-mee\ noun
Metonymy refers to a figure of speech in which a word that is associated with something is used to refer to the thing itself, as when crown is used to mean “king” or “queen.”
// Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood are common examples of metonymy.
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Examples:
“The stick used to command the crowd is called a ‘brigadier.’ A brigadier is usually used to describe one who commands a military brigade, yes, but does not a stage manager lead his theater brigade? That’s the idea, according to organizers. It was a term used so often to refer to a stick-wielding stage manager that, through the magic of metonymy, the stick itself is now referred to as a brigadier.” — Emma Bowman, NPR, 6 Aug. 2024
Did you know?
When Mark Antony asks the people of Rome to lend him their ears in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar he is asking them to listen to him, not to literally allow him to borrow their ears. It’s a classic example of the rhetorical device known as metonymy, which comes to English (via Latin) from the Greek word of the same meaning, metōnymia: the use of a word that is associated with something to refer to the thing itself. Metonymy often appears in news articles and headlines, as when journalists use the term crown to refer to a king or queen. Another common example is the use of an author’s name to refer to works written by that person, as in “They are studying Austen.” Metonymy is closely related to synecdoche, which is a figure of speech in which the word for a part of something is used to refer to the thing itself (as in “need some extra hands for the project”), or less commonly, the word for a thing itself is used to refer to part of that thing (as when society denotes “high society”).
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