Word of the Day:
heteronym
What It Means
A word having the same spelling as another, but with a different meaning and (often) pronunciation.
A fictitious character created by an author for the purpose of writing in a different style.
The word lead (/ˈlɛd/), for the metal, and lead (/ˈliːd/), for a leash, are heteronyms.
Heteronym in Context
“Heteronyms are the distinct poetic personae that Pessoa adopted during the writing of his poems, and who were presented as their true authors.”
Did You Know?
By surface analysis, hetero (“different”) + -onym (“name”). Compare Ancient Greek ἑτερώνυμος (heterṓnumos). First attested in 1885 in sense 1. The coining of this term in sense 3 (as Portuguese heterónimo) is usually attributed to Fernando Pessoa.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: heteronym (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “heteronym.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heteronym. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
