English Dictionary: Retronym | by the DICT Development Group |
2 results for Retronym | |
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]: | |
| |
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]: | |
retronym from new members of the superclass, where the distinction was previously not necessary, since the old subclass had been all there was of the superclass. For example, the retronyms "{snail mail}" and "{paper mail}" were coined by those for who "mail" was likely to mean {electronic mail}. While the English language in general has a few retronyms ("whole milk", "snow skiing", "acoustic guitar"), hacker jargon is necessarily (at points capriciously) rich in retronyms, e.g. {plaintext}, {natural language}, {impact printer}, {eyeball search}, biological {virus}. [More examples?] (2001-02-25) |