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hyponym (HAI-puh-nim) - n., a word that is a subordinate, more specific term for the set denoted by another word.
The inverse of hypernym -- and continuing yesterday's example, ant and beetle are hyponyms of insect. Note that more strictly the hyponym has to be a set itself and not a specific instance: Roger is not a hyponym of person, but man is. (This matters most in the technical jargon of taxonomy, but is also important in analytic semantics and machine learning.) Surprisingly, this was not coined at the same time as hypernym, but about a decade earlier in the 1960s, though it was done with the same model of synonym with the prefix hypo-, under -- and the word for the relationship, hypernymy, is another decade older still. Huh!
---L.
The inverse of hypernym -- and continuing yesterday's example, ant and beetle are hyponyms of insect. Note that more strictly the hyponym has to be a set itself and not a specific instance: Roger is not a hyponym of person, but man is. (This matters most in the technical jargon of taxonomy, but is also important in analytic semantics and machine learning.) Surprisingly, this was not coined at the same time as hypernym, but about a decade earlier in the 1960s, though it was done with the same model of synonym with the prefix hypo-, under -- and the word for the relationship, hypernymy, is another decade older still. Huh!
---L.
