Word Woman

Welcome to another astounding installment of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! Before we move on to the Word of the Week, here's another plug for a very worthy cause I mentioned back in February. If you want to help end world hunger but feel that you don't have enough time or money to make a difference, here's a website you can go to and spend just a few minutes playing an on-line game that donates rice for every answer you get right. It's fun and easy, and it helps to build your vocabulary at the same time. Word Woman challenges you to go to http://www.freerice.com/index.php then post a comment here telling us how many grains of rice you've contributed toward ending world hunger! Now, let's get going with the Word of the Week:

Synecdoche - from Greek sunekdokhê, "simultaneous understanding" (pronounced /sɪˈnɛkdəkɪ/) is a figure of speech in which:

• a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing, or
• a term denoting a thing (a "whole") is used to refer to part of it, or
• a term denoting a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or
• a term denoting a general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or
• a term denoting a material is used to refer to an object composed of that material.

Synecdoche is closely related to metonymy (the figure of speech in which a term denoting one thing is used to refer to a related thing); indeed, synecdoche is often considered a subclass of metonymy. It is more distantly related to other figures of speech, such as metaphor. -- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

* Watch for the upcoming Charlie Kaufman film, Synecdoche, New York.