Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A word whose meaning is included in the meaning of another more general word; for example, bus is a hyponym of vehicle.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A systematic name applied to an undetermined group of animals or plants, and thus not fully or finally established.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (linguistics) a word that is more specific (less abstract) than a given word; a term designating a class which is a subtype of the given word; a subcategory; a subtype. Inverse of hypernym.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun semantics A more specific term; a subordinate grouping word or phrase.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a word that is more specific than a given word

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[hyp(o)– + –onym.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

hypo- + -onym

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Examples

  • Psycholinguistic research has shown that the receiver naturally associates a word with its opposite, e.g. "man - woman," a hyponym, i.e. a word semantically subordinate, e.g. "fruit - apple" or a synonym.

    unknown title 2009

  • Automatic Thesaurus Generation  Hearst (1992) presents an algorithm that can automatically generate a thesaurus or dictionary:  Learning hyponym, meronym relations and more.

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows 2009

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