Hyponyms, Demonyms and Homonyms, Oh my!

Hello again, writers!

While I typically write about creativity and the craft and business of writing, today’s article is going to be a little different. I feel like celebrating words (yes, words!) and all that they do for us as writers.

Even though you may consider yourself to be a skilled scribe, a wizard of words, or an adept author, how much do you really know about linguistics? You can probably pick up on commonly known concepts like alliteration (see what I did there?), but there may be a few that even you, a stellar storyteller, aren’t aware of.

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If synonyms are words that have similar meanings and antonyms have opposite meanings, what is a hyponym?

A hyponym is a word with a more specific meaning than a more general term. For example, ‘bracelet’ is a hyponym of ‘jewelry.’

Hopefully you didn’t confuse hyponyms with homonyms which refers to words that are spelled and/or pronounced the same but have entirely different definitions, like “bat” (used in baseball) and “b…