Word.ws English Dictionary

bathmology

bathmology noun: the science/study of the interplay of "degrees" - or, levels of linguistic self-referentiality - in discourse.

Noun

bathmology (uncountable)

  1. The science/study of the interplay of "degrees" - or, levels of linguistic self-referentiality - in discourse
    • Every discourse is caught up in the interplay of degrees. We might call this interplay bathmology. A neologism is not superfluous if it gives us the notion of a new science: that of the degrees of language.1975, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
    • The qualitative distances separating love, hate, and indifference are what we could learn from a science of degrees, a “bathmology” like the one Barthes dreamed of for the gradations of language.2006, Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, →ISBN

Questions about bathmology

What does bathmology mean?
Bathmology means the science/study of the interplay of "degrees" - or, levels of linguistic self-referentiality - in discourse.
What part of speech is bathmology?
Bathmology is a noun.

Words near bathmology in the dictionary

  1. bathmats
  2. bathmen
  3. bathmic
  4. bathmism
  5. bathmisms
  6. bathmology
  7. bathmophobia
  8. bathmotropic
  9. bathmotropism
  10. bathmotropy
  11. Batho

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bathmology (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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