Word of the Day for Thursday, July 12, 2012

paronymous \puh-RON-uh-muhs\, adjective:
Containing the same root or stem, as the words wise and wisdom.

The sentence seems to reverberate with echoes of assonance—another distinctive trait of Haweke's writing often enriched with alliterative patterns or even rhymes—on both sides of the two central words: "pale petal," whose juxtaposition involves an anagramatical and paronymous variation.
-- Heide Ziegler, "Facing Texts"

This in itself is a significant achievement in a language so flowery and paronymous to the extent that exaggeration, especially at that time of its literary history, is widely considered to be one of its inherent characteristics.
-- Sabry Hafez, "The Quest for Identities"

Paronymous stems from the Greek roots para- meaning "beside" and onoma meaning "a name."

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