meronymia

Meronymia is a term used in linguistics to describe part-whole relationships among lexical items. In English, the related concept is meronymy; meronymia is sometimes encountered as an alternate form or as a field of study focusing on part-whole relational structure. The term derives from Greek meros 'part' and onoma 'name', mirroring the root of meronymy.

A meronym is a term that denotes a part of a whole; the corresponding holonym denotes the whole. Example: wheel is a meronym of car; car is a holonym of wheel; arm is a meronym of body.

In computational linguistics and knowledge representation, meronymy is used to structure lexical databases, ontologies, and thesauri; the relation is often implemented as a part_of relation.

Limitations: Not every association of parts is a true meronym; some relationships are metaphoric or lexicalized differently; the relation may be hierarchical and transitive along some taxonomies; in some contexts, meronymia refers to the systematic study of these relations, including their acquisition and use in language and cognition.

See also: Meronymy, Holonymy, Part-whole relationships, Ontology engineering.