Word.ws English Dictionary

metatype

metatype noun: a topotype of a species which is confirmed as belonging to that species by the author who originally described it.

Noun

metatype (plural metatypes)

  1. A topotype of a species which is confirmed as belonging to that species by the author who originally described it
  2. The type of a type.
    • The Type suffix specifies that this variable will be a metatype and not an object (meaning the implementation class and not an instance of it).2015, Adam Freeman, Pro Design Patterns in Swift, Apress, →ISBN, page 199
    • You can use a variable reference to a type (a metatype) to instantiate that type, but you can't just append parentheses to a variable reference: […]2019, Matt Neuburg, iOS 13 Programming Fundamentals with Swift […] , O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 186

Forms of metatype

pluralmetatypes

Origin of metatype

From meta- + type.

Questions about metatype

What does metatype mean?
Metatype means a topotype of a species which is confirmed as belonging to that species by the author who originally described it.
What part of speech is metatype?
Metatype is a noun.
What is the plural of metatype?
The plural of metatype is metatypes.

Words near metatype in the dictionary

  1. metatuff
  2. metatuffs
  3. metatungstate
  4. metatungstates
  5. metatungstic acid
  6. metatype
  7. metatypes
  8. metatypical
  9. metatypy
  10. metatyuyamunite
  11. metaunderstanding

Source and license

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