Misnomer
For a list of words that are misnomers, see the English misnomers category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary
A misnomer is the wrong name or term for something; a misleading name, often idiomatic.
Some sources of misnomers include
- A word used in ignorance of the true meaning.
- An older name being retained as the thing named evolved (e.g., pencil lead, tin can, fixed income markets, mince meat pie, steamroller). This is essentially a metaphorical extension with the older item standing for anything filling its role.
- A name being based on a similarity in a particular aspect (e.g. asteroids look like stars from Earth, the settled portions of Greenland are greener than the rest)
- A difference between popular and technical meanings of a term. For example a koala "bear" looks and acts much like bears, but from a zoologist's point of view they are quite distinct. Similarly, fireflies fly, ladybugs look and act like bugs and peanuts look and taste like nuts. The technical sense is often cited as the "correct" sense, but this is a matter of context.
- An older name being retained even in the face of newer information (e.g., Chinese checkers, Arabic numerals).
- Ambiguity (e.g., a parkway is generally a road with park-like landscaping, not a place to park).
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Examples
- Christopher Columbus discovered America, even though people have been living in the Americas for thousands of years. Some people and territories that the Europeans found in there were misnamed Indians and West Indies.
- Anti-Semitism is prejudice against Jews, not all Semites.
- Apes are commonly referred to as monkeys.
- Arabic numerals originated in India, not in the Arab world.
- Asteroids are small planets, not star-like objects as their name suggests. However, the name refers to their appearance in small telescopes. A disc is not seen, they appear as points of light, literally star-like.
- In baseball, the statistics on base percentage and slugging percentage are not percentages but averages.
- In logic, begging the question is the term for a type of fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. However, more recently, "begs the question" has been used as a synonym for "raises the question", a usage often sharply criticized by proponents of the traditional meaning.
- The Blitz was the sustained bombing of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941. Although the word Blitz is a shortening of the German word blitzkrieg, meaning "lightning war," it was not an example of blitzkrieg but was an early example of strategic bombing.
- British Isles is most commonly used to refer to constituent countries of the United Kingdom, British Crown Dependencies and Ireland despite the fact that Ireland is not British.
- Catgut is made from sheep intestines.
- Chinese checkers is not Chinese (or even Asian) in origin.
- A coconut is not a nut, but a fruit.
- Lead crystal is not a crystaline solid but an amorphous one—a glass.
- Dry cleaning immerses clothes in liquid solvents that are anything but dry.
- English Horn refers to an alto oboe with an angled mouthpiece. "English" simply mistranslates the French for "angled"; "horn" would seem to indicate a brass instrument rather than a woodwind.
- Fibonacci numbers were originally described by Pingala.
- Fireflies are beetles, not flies, though they do fly.
- Fixed income markets no longer deal predominately with fixed (known) payments.
- Fullscreen is a term commonly used for home viewing releases (DVD, VHS, etc.) of theatrical films to differentiate from their widescreen counterpart. Yet, due to the rising popularity of 16:9 HDTV sets, it is, for the most part, the widescreen versions that are technically "fullscreen" (depending on their original aspect ratio.) Plus, most fullscreen versions of modern films, are in fact cut, zoomed, and panned versions of the original widescreen, so while the image fills a 4:3 screen, it is not in fact a "full" picture. The more correct term is "Pan and scan".
- The fundamental theorem of algebra, though a theorem of algebra, may be proved by various non-algebraic means. This leads to the notion that it is "really" a theorem of analysis (or topology, etc.) and not of algebra. The deeper point that disparate fields of mathematics are connected in non-obvious ways remains valid, but designating the "fundamental theorem of algebra" a misnomer is debatable.
- Greenland is mostly arctic and Iceland is mostly tundra.
- Guinea pigs are not pigs, nor are they from Guinea.
- The Hundred Years' War was actually a series of separate campaigns and battles which continued for 116 years (1337 to 1453).
- The Hollandaise sauce, which is french.
- Despite its name, the Jerusalem artichoke has no relation to Jerusalem, and little to do with artichokes. Jerusalem mistranslates Girasole, the Italian word for sunflower. The taste of the tuber of a Jerusalem artichoke merely resembles the taste of the leaves of the Globe Artichoke.
- Kansas City is a city in Missouri. (Kansas City, Kansas is a suburban outgrowth of Kansas City, Missouri on the other side of the state line. Kansas City, KS has become a large city in and of itself. See also Kansas City, Kansas).
- Koala bears are marsupials not closely related to the Ursid family of bears.
- The "lead" in pencils is made of graphite and clay, not lead, though lead was originally used for the same purpose.
- At Cambridge University, the May ball and May Bumps (boat race) take place in June.
- Newfoundland was considered newly found by those who so named it, but had first been inhabited at least 5,000 years before.
- The Nintendo GameCube is not actually a cube because the sides are not all squares
- The Quad damage power-up on the game Quake III Arena only triples the damage.
- Northwestern University is in northeastern Illinois, a midwestern state. Illinois was, however, part of the historical Northwest Territory.
- The Oktoberfest beer festival actually begins in September.
- Panama hats are from Ecuador, not Panama.
- Peanuts are legumes, not nuts.
- Podcasting neither relates to just the iPod, nor does the technology involve any casting as the consumers pull audio data onto their audio players.
- A quantum leap is properly an instantaneous change, which may be either large or small. In physics, it is the smallest possible changes that are of particular interest. In vernacular usage, however, the term is often taken to imply an abrupt large change.
- A radiator doesn't radiate, it works by convection.
- Reduplication, a term in linguistics actually stands for duplication (and not fourfold repetition).
- Scripting language is often used to describe the properties of some implementation of a programming language, or the original intent of the designer of the language, and not the language itself.
- Several sports teams' names are misnomers, including the Detroit Pistons, who actually play in Auburn Hills, not Detroit, the Washington Redskins who play in Landover, Maryland,and the New York Jets and New York Giants who play in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
- In common usage, a "steep" learning curve implies a difficult learning problem; but on the actual learning curve graph, a steep curve describes a rapid reduction in production cost per unit produced, indicating rapid (easy) learning by the production staff.
- Tin foil is almost always made of aluminium, whereas Tin cans made for the storage of food products are made from steel plated in a thin layer of tin.
- The tremolo arm on guitars is used to produce vibrato; not tremolo. The correct term is "vibrato arm".
- India ink is made in China
- Lead singers of bands also find themselves cast in misnomers, Darius Rucker from the band Hootie and the Blowfish is often referred to as "Hootie" and Debbie Harry from the band Blondie is often called "Blondie". an Anderson, who plays the flute in Jethro Tull, is often called Jethro Tull.
- "Heat lightning" is actually lightning that is too far away for the thunder to be heard.
Triple misnomers
The most famous triple misnomer was observed by Voltaire, who said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Others include the Federal Reserve Bank, which many people feel is not federalist, not a reserve, and not a bank. Some have said that SQL, a database protocol which stands for Structured Query Language, is not structured, is not only for queries, and is not, technically, a language.
See also
Categories
Articles which may be unencyclopedic | Linguistics | Misnomers