A retronym is a word for something that’s been named or renamed to differentiate it from a newer or modified version. They’re usually created by adding an adjective or qualifier to the original term. If you’re currently saying ‘Huh?’ and losing the will to live, let’s have a look at some examples which should hopefully make it clear:
‘acoustic guitar’ is a retronym which appeared after electric guitars – before they were just called ‘guitars’
‘film camera’ turned up after digital cameras were invented – before they were just ‘cameras’
‘landline phone’ is a retronym that appeared after we all got mobiles – before they were just, well, I’m sure you get it now.
As you’ve probably realised from the above, retronyms usually appear when an advancement or change in technology or society means the original term becomes ambiguous.
‘Retronym’ is a relatively young term, and was coined by American linguist Frank Mankiewicz in a magazine article in the early 1980s. It’s made up of two parts:
‘retro’ – you know what retro means, and
‘nym’ which comes from the Greek word ‘onoma’, meaning ‘name’ or ‘word’.
So it basically means ‘a name or word that looks back’.
The word ‘retronym’ follows the same style as other linguistic terms which you may or may not remember from school – like ‘synonym’ (a word that means the same as another word, like ‘big’ and ‘large’ – ‘syn’ being a Greek word for ‘together’ or ‘with’), or antonym (the opposite of a synonym, with the ‘ant’ bit coming from ‘anti’, which is Greek for ‘opposite’ or ‘against’).