RRhetoric
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Metaphor & Figuration

Metonymy

meh-TAH-nuh-mee / mɛˈtɒnəmi

Replacing a thing's name with something associated with it — the crown for the monarchy, the White House for the administration. It works by association rather than resemblance, and the chosen stand-in shows what the writer takes to be essential.

"The pen is mightier than the sword."

Don't confuse it with Metaphor, Synecdoche. Metaphor maps by resemblance; metonymy by association. Synecdoche is the special case where the substitute is a *part* of the whole.

Drill this device — 20 excerpts

In the Reader — 20 excerpts

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
— John Milton, Paradise Lost · open the passage →
When all at once I saw a crowd,
— William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes · open the passage →
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment · open the passage →
Phileas Fogg was one of those mathematically exact people, who, never hurried and always ready, are economical of their steps and their motions.
— Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days · open the passage →
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
— Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native · open the passage →
She had wanted to see life, and fortune had favoured her in a manner which now, as she looked about her, struck her as almost grotesque.
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady · open the passage →
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island · open the passage →
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia · open the passage →
He was there, asleep on the bare floor.
— D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers · open the passage →
costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence · open the passage →
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway · open the passage →
to. He profiled directly in front of the bull, drew the sword out of the folds of the muleta and sighted along the blade.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises · open the passage →
were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury · open the passage →
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiing! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman's voice sang out impatiently: "Bigger, shut that thing off!"
— Richard Wright, Native Son · open the passage →
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea · open the passage →
Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.
— Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits · open the passage →
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved · open the passage →
It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day · open the passage →
My mother's name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband's supper.
— Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries · open the passage →
She had been born here; her mother and grandmother were buried there. All she knew of the world was right here.
— Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad · open the passage →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with metonymy most often — company reveals character.

Parataxis 10 Anaphora 10 Litotes 7 Personification 6 Asyndeton 6 Polysyndeton 6 Apposition / Appositive 6 Passive Voice 4

The rest of the family

Metaphor Simile Catachresis Synecdoche Personification Prosopopoeia Pathetic Fallacy Transferred Epithet / Hypallage Metalepsis Symbol Allusion Mythopoesis