Antonomasia

show This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (August 2013) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Antonomase]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Antonomase}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

In rhetoric, antonomasia is a kind of metonymy in which an epithet or phrase takes the place of a proper name, such as "the little corporal" for Napoleon I; or, conversely, the use of a proper name as an archetypal name, to express a generic idea.

A frequent instance of antonomasia in the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance was the use of the term "the Philosopher" to refer to Aristotle. A more recent example of the other form of antonomasia (usage of archetypes) was the use of "Solons" for "the legislators" in 1930s journalism, after the semi-legendary Solon, lawgiver of Athens.

Stylistically, such epithets may be used for elegant variation to reduce repetition of names in phrases.

The word comes from the Greek ἀντονομασία, antonomasia, itself from the verb ἀντονομάζειν, antonomazein 'to name differently'.^[1][2][3]

Opposite examples[]

See "archetypal name" for examples of the opposite kind of antonomasia.

One common example in French is the word for fox: the Latin-derived French: goupil was replaced by French: renard, from Renart, the fox hero of the Roman de Renart; originally German Reinhard.

Examples[]

hideThis section has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This section may contain indiscriminate, excessive, or irrelevant examples. Please by adding more descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (October 2019) This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Persons[]

• "El Caudillo" for Francisco Franco
• "El Jefe" for Rafael Trujillo
• "Il Duce" for Benito Mussolini
• "La Divina" for Maria Callas
• "La Stupenda" for Joan Sutherland
• "Man of Steel" or simply "Steel" for Joseph Stalin
• "Mr. Soul" for Sam Cooke
• "Old Blue Eyes" or "The Chairman of the Board" for Frank Sinatra
• "Pelides" or "the son of Peleus" for Achilles^[3]
• "Son of Laertes" or "Man of Pain" for Odysseus
• "The (Great) Bambino" for Babe Ruth
• "The Bard" for William Shakespeare
• "The Big Bopper" for Jiles Perry Richardson, Jr
• "The Boss" for Bruce Springsteen
• "The Commentator" for Averroes (so named for his commentaries on "The Philosopher" Aristotle's works)
• "The Don" for Sir Donald Bradman
• "The Donald" for Donald Trump

• "The Fab Four" for The Beatles
• "The First Lady of Song" for Ella Fitzgerald
• "The Führer" for Adolf Hitler
• "The Genius of the Carpathians" for Nicolae Ceausescu (note that this is only used ironically)
• "The Gipper" or "The Great Communicator" for Ronald Reagan
• "The Great Commoner" for Winston Churchill
• "The Great Emancipator" or "Honest Abe" for Abraham Lincoln
• "The Great Silent One" for Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
• "The Greatest" for Muhammad Ali
• "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" or "Soul Brother Number 1" or “The Godfather of Soul” for James Brown
• "The High Priestess of Soul" for Nina Simone
• "The Iron Chancellor" for Otto von Bismarck
• "The Iron Lady" or "The Leaderene" for Margaret Thatcher
• "Radical Jack" for John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham
• "The King of Pop" for Michael Jackson
• "The King" for Elvis Presley
• "The Little Corporal" or "Corsican Ogre" for Napoleon^[3]
• "The Little Master" for Sachin Tendulkar
• "The Mahatma" for Mohandas Gandhi
• "The Master of Suspense" for Alfred Hitchcock
• "The Prince of Darkness" for William Francis Galvin^[4][5]
• "The Queen of Pop" or "The Material Girl" for Madonna
• "The Little Private" for Adolf Hitler before the Machtergreifung
• "The Queen of Soul" for Aretha Franklin
• "The Red Baron" for Manfred von Richthofen
• "The Shah" for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
• "The Stagirite" or "The Philosopher" for Aristotle^[3]
• "The Steel Butterfly" for Imelda Marcos
• "The Tiger of Mysore" for Tipu Sultan

Fictional characters[]

• "The Boy Who Lived" for Harry Potter
• "The Dark Knight" or "The Caped Crusader" for Batman (also referred as "The Dynamic Duo" when paired with fictional sidekick, Robin)
• "The Man of Steel" or the "Man of Tomorrow" for Superman
• "The Mother of Dragons" for Daenerys Targaryen
• "The Ring Bearer" for Frodo Baggins

Works of art[]

• "The Scottish play" for Macbeth

Places[]

• "Auld Reekie" for Edinburgh
• "The Big Apple" for New York City
• "City of Dreams" for Mumbai
• "The City of Hundred Gates" for ancient Thebes, Egypt
• "The City of Kings" for Lima, Peru
• "The City of Light" for Paris
• "The City of Palaces" for Mexico City
• "The Eternal City" or "Urbe" for Rome
• "La La Land" for Los Angeles
• "The Little Paris" for Paceco
• "The Smoke" for London
• "The South American Athens" for Bogotá
• "The White City" for the World's Columbian Exposition
• "The Windy City" for Chicago
• "The Emerald City" for the fictional Land of Oz

See also[]

• Eponym
• Sobriquet
• Synecdoche
• Trademark erosion
• Honorific nicknames in popular music

References[]

External links[]

Listen to this article (5 minutes)

Menu

0:00

This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 16 July 2019 (2019-07-16), and does not reflect subsequent edits.

(Audio help · More spoken articles)

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Antonomasia" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.