Retronym

A retronym is a new name for something that differentiates the original from a more recent form or version.

Advances in technology are often responsible for retronym coinage. For example, the term "acoustic guitar" was coined at the advent of electric guitars and analog watches were thus named to distinguish them from digital watches.

Examples

This column about "trucks and cars" from Popular Mechanics in 1914 was written when the word truck did not necessarily connote a motor truck and the word car did not necessarily connote a motor car. The same topics today would most likely be talked about with the terms hand trucks and railroad cars. Those terms existed in 1914 as well, but they were not required for clarity, as they would be today.

Sometimes retronyms serve to differentiate two similarly named people, as with U.S. President George Bush, who, after his son George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, was typically referred to as "George Bush, Sr.", "George H. W. Bush", "H. W.", or "Bush 41" (as he was the 41st U.S. President).

In the entertainment industry, this can manifest itself as calling a movie "Part 1" after sequels are released or by slightly altering the title (e.g., Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope or Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark) to emphasize its connection with the sequel(s), or by referring to a television series as "the original", as in Star Trek: The Original Series.. This is similar to World War One, which was called the Great War prior to World War Two.

The earliest razors with encased blades were called "safety razors" to distinguish them from what were then just called "razors". But the safety razor has since become the standard and the original razor generally called a "straight razor" or "cut-throat razor".

The first bicycles with two wheels of equal size were called "safety bicycles" because they were easier to handle than the then-dominant style that had one large wheel and one small wheel, which then became known as an "ordinary" bicycle. Since the end of the 19th century, most bicycles have been expected to have two equal sized wheels, and the other type has been renamed "penny-farthing" or "high-wheeler" bicycle.

In the UK (and increasingly elsewhere), the term "real ale" has been used since the early 1970s to distinguish beers produced and served by traditional British methods from gas-pressurised beers that became more popular during the earlier part of the twentieth-century.

With the increasing discussion and legalization of same-sex marriage in the 20th and 21st centuries, terms such as "straight marriage" and "heterosexual marriage" arose to distinguish a set of unions which the term "marriage" had previously meant by default. Similarly, the term cisgender was coined to describe persons who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

In Judaism, the Hebrew Bible is referred to as the Tanakh, an acronym for its three sections (the Torah or Pentateuch, the Nevi'im or Prophets, and the Ketuvim or Writings). In Christianity, the Bible includes an additional section, the New Testament, calling the Hebrew Bible the "Old Testament."

Evolution in usage

The original use of an adjective to describe a particular variant of an object is typically compositional, as in "acoustic guitar", but gradually over time it becomes a collocation, a name or technical term in its own right with additional nuances, greater specificity, and general but implicit agreement on it as the appropriate term versus alternative descriptions of the original.

The main exceptions to this relate to ownership, such as a trademark owner adding words to an existing product name or brand to create differentiated names for new variants of a product, which thus enjoy the status of a name immediately upon release of the product range.

Word history

The term retronym was coined by Frank Mankiewicz in 1980 and popularized by William Safire in The New York Times Magazine.

In 2000 The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition) became the first major dictionary to include the word retronym.

In some instances back-formation can be a type of retronymy; for example, humans have always diagnosed diseases (to whatever limited extent that they understood physiology and medicine in each era), but the verb to diagnose as a back-formation from the noun diagnosis was not attested in written English until about 1859. It was thus a new name for an old action.

See also

• Back-formation
• Backronym
• List of retronyms
• Contrastive focus reduplication
• -onym