agnonym
AGG-nuh-nim
noun
A word that native speakers of a given language are not familiar with or are unlikely to understand
I have been cursed with a surprisingly busy weekend this week, dear readers, and find my stores of etymological enthusiasm running parlously low. As such I’ll rely on the faithful formula; whip out a new word and hope for the best.
‘Agnonym’ is an excellent example of what is known as an autological word - a word that is an example of itself. ‘Pentasyllabic’ and ‘writable’ are similar examples of autological words. ‘Monosyllabic’ and ‘palindrome’ are examples of the opposite phenomenon - words that do not describe themselves - called heterological words.
‘Agnonym’ is a Greek, etymologically (we’ve had a lot of those recently, perhaps my desire to relax in Santorini is spilling into Word of the Week). The prefix ‘a-’ is well known and means ‘without’, and is included in many common words like ‘amoral’ and ‘asexual’. The ‘-gno-’ infix comes from ‘gnosis’ (‘knowledge’) and is most obvious in the word ‘agnostic’ (ie ‘not knowing’). And finally ‘-nym’ comes from ‘onoma’ (‘name’) and is frequently seen in other linguistic mumbo-jumbo like ‘synonym’, ‘antonym’, ‘hyponym’ and ‘meronym’.