Category Archives: Uncategorized

connotation

Definition | Meaning

  1. >A word’s extrinsic, figurative senses, including its overtones and shades of meaning.

Example | Illustration

  • the word ‘travel’ can connote different things to various people – some may think of driving a car, while others think of journeying to exotic locations, while still others think of the hassle involved with getting from airport to airport

Etymology | Origin

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  • denotation

collocation

Definition | Meaning

  1. The likelihood that a particular word will occur in the neighborhood of another word.

Example | Illustration

  • This tendency can be exploited by commercial names. The words ‘spick’ and ‘span’ are an example of collocation; the phrase these words always from inspired the Spic and Span brand cleaning product name.

Etymology | Origin

clutter

Definition | Meaning

  1. The proliferation of virtually indistinguishable names within a particular category.

Example | Illustration

  • the high-tech industry is ‘cluttered’ with ‘net’ names

Etymology | Origin

charactonym

Definition | Meaning

  1. Any name given to a literary character that is descriptive of a quality or trait of that character.

Example | Illustration

  • ‘Long John Silver’ for someone who is tall and has silver hair

Etymology | Origin

centripetal force

Definition | Meaning

  1. The cultural tendency of a set of regional dialects to coalesce into a standard language in response to a center of gravity.

Example | Illustration

  • the recent standardization of Mandarin Chinese on the model of the Beijing dialect

Etymology | Origin

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  • centrifugal force

centrifugal force

Definition | Meaning

  1. The natural tendency of a language to branch into a set of regional dialects.

Example | Illustration

  • the distinctive dialects of British English are the result of centrifugal force

Etymology | Origin

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  • centripetal force

calque

Definition | Meaning

  1. The literal translation of a word from one language into the lexicon of another.

Example | Illustration

  • the Mandarin Chinese term nan pengyou ‘male friend’ is a direct translation of the English word ‘boyfriend’

Etymology | Origin

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  • borrowing