The nym family has many offspring, including exonym and endonym, as discussed yesterday. Here are a few more of their unruly brood:

Homonyms
These are words that are pronounced the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. For example: write (to inscribe), right (correct/opposite of left), rite (ritual) and wright (a maker); night (opposite of day), knight (a chess piece). Many more English homonyms are listed here.

Heteronyms
Words spelled the same, but pronounced differently and having different meanings, e.g. bass (low) and bass (a type of fish); polish (to shine) and Polish (from Poland). Some heteronyms are distinguished by the placement of the stress, others by pronouncation. Polish/polish is also an example of a capitonym, a word that has a different meaning when capitalized.

Antagonyms/Contranyms
These are words with two meanings that contradict each other, such as assume: to actually have (to assume office) vs. to hope to have (he assumed he would be elected). Another example is custom (ordinary vs. special) — It was custom in these parts to have your boots custom made. More examples can be found here.

Anacronym
An acronym that is so well established that its origin as an abbreviation is no longer widely known (a portmanteau of anachronism + acronym), for example scuba and laser.

Ananym
A name written backward and used as a pseudonym.

Eponym
A word derived from the name of a person. For example the sandwich is named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792), and the word boycott comes from a certain 19th century Irish landlord, Charles C. Boycott (1832-1897).

Peking is an example of an exonym, a name given to a place or group of people by foreigners. Other exonyms for places in China include Canton, Amoy, Macau and China itself. The endonyms or autonyms (native names) for these places are 广州 (Guǎngzhōu in Mandarin, Gwóngjàu in Cantonese); 厦门 (Xiàmén), 澳門 (Ngoumún) and 中国 (Zhōngguó).

English exonyms for countries in Europe include:

Croatia (Hrvatska), Finland (Suomi), Germany (Deutschland), Hungary (Magyarország), Poland (Polska), Spain (España), Sweden (Sverige) and Wales (Cymru)

English exonyms for cities in Europe include:

Copenhagen (København), Moscow (Москва/Moskva), Prague (Praha), Rome (Roma), The Hague (Den Haag), Munich (München), Cologne (Köln), Vienna (Wien) and Warsaw (Warszawa)

(the endonyms are shown in brackets)

Exonyms are used in other languages, of course, not just in English. For example, London is called Londres in French, Spanish and Portuguese, Londra in Italian and Romanian, Llundain in Welsh, Lunnain in Scottish Gaelic, ロンドン (rondon) in Japanese, and 倫敦 [伦敦] (Lúndūn) in Mandarin.

You can find the native names (endonym/autonyms) of all the countries of the world here and the native names of many languages here, and a good place to find both exonyms and endonyms of countries, cities, languages, etc. is www.geonames.de

A portmanteau is a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments. The word comes from the Middle French porter (to carry) and manteau (mantle). In modern French the word means coat rack.

A portmanteau word or portmanteau is one that fuses several grammatical inflections, or one that combines parts of two or more words. The first definition is the one used by linguists, who know portmanteaux of the second type as blends.

The term portmanteau was coined by Lewis Carroll and first appeared in his book, Through the Looking Glass, in 1871. When explaining the word slithy from Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy … You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

Other portmanteaux in English include brunch (breakfast + lunch), smog (smoke + fog), aquarobics (aqua – aerobics), infomercial (information + comercial), advertorial (advertisement + editorial), and of course blog (web + log).

An interesting portmanteau I came across today was snickanas (snickers + bananas) – a snack one of my friends invented.

Main source: Wikipedia

mimesis, noun = the imitative representation of nature or human behaviour; any disease that shows symptoms of another disease; a condition in a hysterical patient that mimics an organic disease; representation of another person’s alleged words in a speech.

Origin: from the Greek μιμεισθαι (mimeisthai) – to imitate.

Related words include mime, mimic, mimicry and mimetic.

I came across this word in a post on No-sword about the crazy-sounding Japanese sport of Sports Chanbara (スポーツチャンバラ). When discussing the origin of the word chanbara, which is an abbreviation of chanchan barabara (チャンチャンバラバラ), No-sword says the the chanchan part “is mimesis for the sound of swords clashing”. I hadn’t seen this word before so had to look it up in the dictionary, and I like the sound of it. This is also an example of onomatopeia, something that’s quite common in Japanese.

Snowclones are adaptable templates for clichés popular with journalists and writers. For example, X is the new Y, A doesn’t know the meaning of B, and C is D’s middle name. Just replace the letters with words and you have a cliché you can use in quite a wide range of circumstances.

Wikipedia defines a snowclone as: “a neologism used to describe a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context”

Here are a few examples:

grey is the new black
coders are from Mars, designers are from Venus
the only good language is a dead language
the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines
the internet is the best thing since sliced bread
the word surrender is not in my dictionary

There are many more templates on Answers.com

The term snowclone was coined by Glen Whitman, an Associate Professor of Economics, California State University, Northridge, on 15th January 2004. There’s more discussion of this topic on Language Log.