Meronymy


Meronymy is a semantic relation specific to linguistics, distinct from the similar metonymy. A meronym denotes a constituent part of, or a member of something.
That is,
For example, finger is a meronym of hand because a finger is part of a hand. Similarly, ' is a meronym of automobile.
Meronymy is the opposite of holonymy. A closely related concept is that of mereology, which specifically deals with part-whole relations and is used in logic. It is formally expressed in terms of first-order logic. A meronymy can also be considered a partial order.
A meronym refers to a part of a whole. A word denoting a subset of what another word denotes is a hyponym. For example, a hyponym of tree is pine tree or oak tree, but a meronym of tree is bark or leaf.
In knowledge representation languages, meronymy is often expressed as "part-of'''".

Etymology

The word meronymy comes from the Greek meros + onuma, meaning "a named part of the thing". Thus it refers to naming parts of a thing, not a category or type of thing.