Retronym (Words)

A retronym is a new word or phrase (such as snail mail, analog watch, landline phone, cloth diaper, two-parent family, natural turf, and kinetic warfare) created for an old object or concept whose original name has become associated with something else or is no longer unique. Language maven William Safire defined retronym as "a noun fitted with an adjective that it never used to need but now cannot do without."

The term retronym was coined in 1980 by Frank Mankiewicz, then president of National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States.

Examples and Observations

Bill Sherk: Remember when a guitar was just a guitar? Then along came electric guitars, giving rise to the term 'acoustic guitar' to set the original apart from the new invention. In this case, acoustic guitar is a retronym.

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Definition and Examples of Paronyms

By Richard Nordquist

Joel Stein: People here [at the Oculus building on the Facebook campus] are so comfortable with VR that they they refer to things outside of virtual reality — what most people call 'life' — as RR, or real reality.

William Safire: Those fogies that S. J. Perelman wrote were 'afflicted with total recall' will remember what they used to call water. With the rising tide of bottled water, not to mention sparkling water (formerly soda water, or seltzer), New Yorkers who yearn for the pristine product of the local reservoirs have taken to asking the waiter for Bloomberg water, formerly Giuliani water, after the sitting mayor’s name. In the rest of the nation, that refreshing and pleasantly inexpensive drink, not carbonated but with its own beaded bubbles winking at the brim, is now known by the retronym tap water.

John Schwartz: We developed a retronym: if I slipped a book — the kind with covers and pages — into my backpack for the train or to get started on at home, that meant I was reading a 'book-book.' Of course the term itself reinforced her belief — I won’t call it a prejudice — against audio reading.

Jeffrey F. Beatty and Susan S. Samuelson: A computer signature does not look like handwriting; instead, it is a unique series of letters and numbers in code. A digital signature can actually be safer than the traditional wet signature. If the digital document is dishonestly altered, the sender and recipient can tell.

Lev Grossman: Now a clue has surfaced: a note on an anonymous bulletin board (the nonvirtual, paper kind) called the Secret Place that says 'I know who killed him.'

Sol Steinmetz: In the 1930s and 1940s, the term satellite became standard for any device designed to be put into terrestrial orbit, a feat achieved in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union.
"So as not to confuse the new, human-made satellites with the astronomical ones, the retronym artificial satellite was coined after 1957.

D. Gary Miller: Retronyms are known in scientific circles as well. Classical mechanics (1933) was created by opposition to quantum mechanics (1922) ... Nuclei in physics were initially bound (by implication) but with the creation of unbound nuclei are now called bound nuclei (1937).

Pronunciation: RET-re-nim