Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with … See more

The words metonymy and metonym come from Ancient Greek μετωνυμία (metōnumía) 'a change of name'; from μετά (metá) 'after, post, beyond', and -ωνυμία (-ōnumía), a suffix that names figures of speech, from ὄνυμα… See more

Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday speech and writing. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Polysemy, the capacity for a word or phrase to h… See more

Metonymy takes many different forms.
Synecdoche uses a part to refer to the whole, or the whole to refer to the part.
Metalepsis uses a familiar word or a phrase in a new context. For example, "lead foot" may descri… See more

Western culture studied poetic language and deemed it to be rhetoric. A. Al-Sharafi supports this concept in his book Textual Metonymy, "Greek rhetorical scholarship at one time became entirely poetic scholarship." … See more

Metonymy became important in French structuralism through the work of Roman Jakobson. In his 1956 essay "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles", Jakobson relates metonymy to the linguistic practice of [… See more

Metonyms can also be wordless. For example, Roman Jakobson argued that cubist art relied heavily on nonlinguistic metonyms, while surrealist art relied more on metaphors.
Lakoff and … See more