Malapropism

3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  malapropism \mal"a*prop*ism\, n. [From Mrs. Malaprop, a
     character in Sheridan's drama, " The Rivals," who makes
     amusing blunders in her use of words. See {Malapropos}.]
     A grotesque misuse of a word; a word so used.
     [1913 Webster]



From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  malapropism
       n : the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one
           that sounds similar [syn: {malaprop}]

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

  87 Moby Thesaurus words for "malapropism":
     Irish bull, abuse of terms, acrostic, alliteration, allusion,
     amphibologism, amphiboly, anacoluthon, anadiplosis, anagram,
     analogy, anaphora, anastrophe, antiphrasis, antithesis,
     antonomasia, apophasis, aporia, aposiopesis, apostrophe, barbarism,
     bull, calembour, catachresis, chiasmus, circumlocution, climax,
     conversion, corruption, ecphonesis, emphasis, equivocality,
     equivoque, exclamation, fluff, folk etymology, gemination,
     grammatical error, hypallage, hyperbaton, hyperbole,
     hypercorrection, hyperform, infelicity, inversion, irony,
     jeu de mots, litotes, logogram, logogriph, malaprop, marrowsky,
     meiosis, metagram, metaphor, metonymy, misconstruction,
     mispronunciation, missaying, misusage, onomatopoeia, oxymoron,
     palindrome, paregmenon, parenthesis, paronomasia, periphrasis,
     personification, play on words, pleonasm, preterition, prolepsis,
     pun, punning, regression, repetition, sarcasm, simile, similitude,
     solecism, spoonerism, syllepsis, symploce, synecdoche,
     ungrammaticism, wordplay, zeugma