Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A word whose meaning includes the meaning of a more specific word; for example, animal is a hypernym of elephant.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun a word that is more generic or more abstract than a given word; a word designating a class of which the given word is a member. Inverse of subtype and hyponym.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun semantics A word or phrase whose
referents form a set including as a subset the referents of asubordinate term.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a word that is more generic than a given word
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[hyper– + (–o)nym (on the model of hyponym, taken as hypo– + -nym).]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Ancient Greek hyper- (“over”) + -onym (“name”). From Greek roots; compare Latinate “superordinate term”.
Support
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Examples
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A friend has a hypernym for niece-or-nephew: "nibling".
On needed words DC 2010
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Actually it looks like you can use perpetuate in that context, meaning to uphold, the hypernym of perpetuate.
Educating America: Cheating on papers is a booming Web business 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hypernym
An unfortunate choice of word, especially coming from linguists. To be well-formed Greek it should be 'hyperonym': this contains all the root ονυμ- "name", and clearly isn't a homophone of its antonym 'hyponym'.
July 8, 2008