Meronymy (from the Greek words meros part and onoma name) is a semantic relation used in linguistics. A meronym denotes a constituent part of or a member of something. That is X is a meronym of Y if Xs are parts of Y(s) or X is a meronym of Y if Xs are members of Y(s).

For example 'finger' is a meronym of 'hand' because a finger is part of a hand. Similarly 'wheel' is a meronym of 'automobile'.

Meronymy is the opposite of holonymy. A closely related concept is that of mereology which specifically deals with part/whole relations and is used in logic. It is formally expressed in terms of first-order logic.

A meronym means part of a whole. A word denoting a subset of what another word denotes is a hyponym.

In knowledge representation languages meronymy is often expressed as "part-of". External links Online source for English language Everything2 entry v d eLexicography Types of reference works Dictionary  Glossary  Lexicon  Thesaurus Types of dictionaries Bilingual  Biographical  Conceptual  Defining  Electronic  Encyclopedic  Language for specific purposes dictionary  Machine-readable  Maximizing  Medical  Minimizing  Monolingual learner's  Multi-field  Phonetic  Picture  Reverse  Rhyming  Rime  Single-field  Specialized  Sub-field  Visual Lexicographic projects Lexigraf  WordNet Other List of lexicographers  List of online dictionaries v d eLexicology Major terms Lexicon  Idiolect  Word  Lexis  Lexical unit Elements Morpheme  Grapheme  Glyphs  Phoneme  Sememe  Seme  Lexeme  Lemma  Meronymy  Chereme Semantic relations Holonymy  Hyponymy  Troponymy  Idiom  Synonym  Antonymy  Lexical semantics  Semantic net Fonctions Function word  Headword Fields Morphology  Controlled vocabulary  English lexicology and lexicography  Lexicographic error  Lexicographic information cost  Linguistic prescription  Specialised lexicography  International scientific vocabulary This linguistics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.v d e