Word.ws English Dictionary

xenonymy

xenonymy noun: the juxtaposition of semantically incompatible words.

Noun

xenonymy (uncountable)

  1. The juxtaposition of semantically incompatible words.
    • Cruse calls lexical items which create such dissonance xenonyms; where such odd or incompatible lexical semantic relations are arranged across and between sentences we might call the overall effect cognitive xenonymy.2000, Tony Bex, Michael Burke, Peter Stockwell, Contextualized Stylistics: In Honour of Peter Verdonk, →ISBN, page 28
    • The lobster telephone, the dissonant xenonymy of accidents in a chainpoem, the urinal in the art gallery and the sound poem at a literary evening are all only singularly convulsive.2012, Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, Brian McHale, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, →ISBN, page 57

Origin of xenonymy

From xeno- + -onymy.

Questions about xenonymy

What does xenonymy mean?
Xenonymy means the juxtaposition of semantically incompatible words.
What part of speech is xenonymy?
Xenonymy is a noun.

Words near xenonymy in the dictionary

  1. xenonlike
  2. xenons
  3. xenonym
  4. xenonymous
  5. xenonyms
  6. xenonymy
  7. xenopaleontology
  8. xenoparasite
  9. xenoparasites
  10. xenoparasitic
  11. xenoparasitism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: xenonymy (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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