contextomy
contextomy noun: the act or practice of quoting somebody out of context, often to give a false impression of what they said.
Noun
contextomy (countable and uncountable, plural contextomies)
- The act or practice of quoting somebody out of context, often to give a false impression of what they said.
- …saying that the Literary Gazette had committed the Chicago Tribune's habitual crime of contextomy against me.1964, Milton Mayer, What can a man do?: A selection of his most challenging writings, page 33
- The competent quoteman, no matter how eager he is to outwit his opponent, will have neither the need nor the inclination to stoop to contextomy of the flagrantly mendacious sort.1967, Paul F. Boller, Quotemanship: the use and abuse of quotations for polemical and other purposes, page 286
- Synonyms:
- quote mining
Synonyms of contextomy
Forms of contextomy
| plural | contextomies |
|---|
Origin of contextomy
From context + -tomy.
Words formed from contextomy
Questions about contextomy
- What does contextomy mean?
- Contextomy means the act or practice of quoting somebody out of context, often to give a false impression of what they said.
- What part of speech is contextomy?
- Contextomy is a noun.
- What is the plural of contextomy?
- The plural of contextomy is contextomies.
Words near contextomy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: contextomy (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “contextomy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contextomy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.