Word.ws English Dictionary

taxonyms

taxonyms is the plural of taxonym.

Meaning of taxonym

Noun

taxonym (plural taxonyms)

  1. A word used for classification purposes, that is, one that makes up part of a taxonomy; a name or label for a taxon or clade
    • If a single phyletic series alone is known it is then covered by a single taxonym (however it may be artificially segmented into subsidiary taxa); but if collateral branches are later found, or reconstructed, or attached by the systematist — branches each one of which includes the ancestor — there...1971 June, Thomas Neville George, “Systematics in palaeontology: President's anniversary address 1969”, in Journal of the Geological Society, volume 127, number 3, →DOI, pages 226–227
  2. A hyponym that differs only by properties that are highlighted in the corresponding hypernym.
    • Ash-blonde and strawberry blonde are satisfactory taxonyms of blonde, but they are by no means the optimal subcategories of BLONDE.2004, William Croft, D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics, →ISBN, page 149

Questions about taxonyms

What is taxonyms the plural of?
Taxonyms is the plural of taxonym.

Words near taxonyms in the dictionary

  1. taxonomizing
  2. taxonomy
  3. taxons
  4. taxonym
  5. taxonymic
  6. taxonyms
  7. taxonymy
  8. taxophobic
  9. taxor
  10. taxors
  11. taxotere

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: taxonyms (page history and authors); taxonym (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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