Meronymy (from the Greek words meros = part and onoma = name) is a semantic relation used in linguistics. A meronym denotes a constituent part of, or a member of something. That is,
For example, 'finger' is a meronym of 'hand' because a finger is part of a hand. Similarly 'wheel' is a meronym of 'automobile'.
Meronymy is the opposite of holonymy. A closely related concept is that of mereology, which specifically deals with part/whole relations and is used in logic. It is formally expressed in terms of first-order logic.
A meronym means part of a whole. A word denoting a subset of what another word denotes is a hyponym.
In knowledge representation languages, meronymy is often expressed as "part-of".
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