Meanings
- uncountableThe juxtaposition of semantically incompatible words.
The lobster telephone, the dissonant xenonymy of accidents in a chainpoem, the urinal in the art gallery and the sound poem at a literary evening are all only singularly convulsive.
2012, Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, Brian McHale, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, →ISBN, page 572 more examples
Cruse calls lexical items which create such dissonance xenonyms; where such odd or incompatible lexical semantic relations are arranged across and between sentences we might call the overall effect cognitive xenonymy.
2000, Tony Bex, Michael Burke, Peter Stockwell, Contextualized Stylistics: In Honour of Peter Verdonk, →ISBN, page 28A lexicon can therefore be said to correspond more to a dynamic system of relations: a) syntagmatic sense relations between lexical units in the same string, ie philonymy, xenonymy, tautonymy; b) paradigmatic sense relations between lexical units occurring in a given combination, and a set of possibilities provided by the language...
2013, Romina Vergari, “Aspects of Polysemy in Biblical Greek. A Preliminary Study for a New Lexicographical Resource”, in Digital Humanitiesin Biblical, Early Jewish and Early Christian Studies, →ISBN
Origin
Rhymes & wordplay
Rhymes with xenonymy
Cite this entry
xenonymy. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/xenonymy
“xenonymy.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/xenonymy. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “xenonymy,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/xenonymy.
Source: xenonymy on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.