Hyponymic

Hyponymic is an adjective used in linguistics to describe the relationship of a word that denotes a specific instance within a broader category, i.e., a hyponym. The corresponding general term is the hypernym.

In lexical semantics, hyponymy is the relation in which the set of referents of one word is a subset of the set of referents of another. If X is a hyponym of Y, then X is more specific, and Y is more general. The relation is transitive: if a is a hyponym of b and b is a hyponym of c, then a is a hyponym of c.

Examples: "dog" is a hyponym of "animal"; "poodle" is a hyponym of "dog".

In computational linguistics and lexicography, hyponymic relations are encoded in resources like WordNet and used to build lexical hierarchies, inform semantic search, word sense disambiguation, and taxonomy generation.

Related terms include hypernym and hyponymy; WordNet is a prominent resource for observing hyponymic structures.