antonomastic

an·to·no·ma·sia

(ăn′tə-nə-mā′zhə)

1. The substitution of a title or epithet for a proper name, as in calling a sovereign "Your Majesty."

2. The substitution of a personal name for a common noun to designate a member of a group or class, as in calling a traitor a "Benedict Arnold."

[Latin, from Greek antonomazein, to name instead : anti-, instead of; see anti- + onomazein, to name (from onoma, name; see nō̆-men- in Indo-European roots).]

an′to·no·mas′tic (-măs′tĭk) adj.

an′to·no·mas′ti·cal·ly adv.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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References in periodicals archive ?

Less familiar than this exaltation of the antonomastic urbs is a persistent counter-discourse of anti-Romanism, of antipathy to Rome as both a place and an idea.

Capital City: Rome 1870-2010

This meant trying to give these common nouns an antonomastic meaning so as to create labels that served as proper nouns: the Holocaust, the Genocide, the Catastrophe, the Shoah.

A name for extermination

Carletti's mercantile maraviglia is applied to the wealth he observed, particularly in Peru, a toponym that was already acquiring an antonomastic connotation for the enormous profits that merchants were quickly making there (his ecstatic description of local merchants sleeping on stacks of silver ingots, 4748 ); and his astonishment at the exceptionally honest attitude of the merchants in Goa ("e cosa di maraviglia l'osservanza della realta et fedelta in tutte le loro attioni," 217).