Word.ws English Dictionary

metalinguistic

metalinguistic adjective: treating words as words, rather than interacting with their meaning.

Adjective

metalinguistic (not comparable)

  1. Treating words as words, rather than interacting with their meaning.
    • Mary is still one of the most popular girl's names. This represents a metalinguistic use of Mary: the case where we cite a linguistic expression in order to say something about it qua linguistic expression.2002, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
  2. Pertaining to metalinguistics.

Origin of metalinguistic

From meta- + linguistic.

Words formed from metalinguistic

Questions about metalinguistic

What does metalinguistic mean?
Metalinguistic means treating words as words, rather than interacting with their meaning.
What part of speech is metalinguistic?
Metalinguistic is an adjective.

Words near metalinguistic in the dictionary

  1. metalimnions
  2. metaline
  3. metaling
  4. metalingual
  5. metalinguist
  6. metalinguistic
  7. metalinguistically
  8. metalinguistics
  9. metalinguists
  10. metalise
  11. metalised

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: metalinguistic (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: “metalinguistic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/metalinguistic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.