meronym

A meronym is a lexical unit that denotes a part of something else. In the study of semantics, the part–whole relationship between terms is described as meronymy. The term that denotes the whole is called the holonym, while the term denoting a part is the meronym. This arrangement captures how objects and concepts are assembled from components or members.

Examples include: "finger" as a meronym of "hand"; "wheel" and "engine" as meronyms of "car"; "page" as a meronym of "book." Some relations are not strictly physical parts but functional components or members, e.g., "chapter" of "book" or "ingredient" of "recipe." Meronymy is often contrasted with holonymy, and with other lexical relations such as hypernymy/hyponymy (is-a) and synonymy. In a meronymic relation, the meronym is typically a part, component, or member of the whole, whereas the holonym is the whole to which the part belongs.

In linguistic analysis and natural language processing, meronymy is used to model part–whole structures, for example in semantic networks, ontologies, and information extraction. It can be difficult to determine in text due to context and polysemy, and it is not strictly transitive in all cases. The study of meronymy complements other lexical relations to capture the structural organization of concepts.