Word.ws English Dictionary

exonymy

exonymy noun: the use of the name for a group or geographic region by outsiders, as opposed to that by its members or inhabitants.

Noun

exonymy (uncountable)

  1. The use of the name for a group or geographic region by outsiders, as opposed to that by its members or inhabitants.
    • Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (Brazil/Paris) analysed the comparative relation between exonymy and endonymy in lowland South America.2000 June, B Bodenhorn, G vom Bruck, “Processes of Naming”, in Anthropology Today, volume 16, number 3
    • As such, there arises a symbolic association between endonymy and the firstborn, and exonymy and the last-born, in keeping with the idea that the firstborn represents internal continuity and the last-born represents the transformation associated with exteriority. Indeed, in the practice of...2008, Tany˜xiwe's Journey: A Javae Theory of History, →ISBN, page 998

Origin of exonymy

From exo- + -onymy.

Questions about exonymy

What does exonymy mean?
Exonymy means the use of the name for a group or geographic region by outsiders, as opposed to that by its members or inhabitants.
What part of speech is exonymy?
Exonymy is a noun.

Words near exonymy in the dictionary

  1. exonym
  2. exonymic
  3. exonymically
  4. exonymous
  5. exonyms
  6. exonymy
  7. exooccipital
  8. exoosmosis
  9. exoosmotic
  10. exoparasite
  11. exoparasites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: exonymy (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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