Retronym: Difference between revisions
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Latest revision as of 13:03, 30 May 2024
A retronym (a portmanteau of retro- (before) and acronym)
- is a new name for an existing term
- usually to help distinguish it when more variants were introduced
- Most of these are not abbreviations (other -nyms rae)
- for example
- conventional oven, when the microwave oven was introduced
- live music, when recording came around
- meatspace, when cyberspace was coined
- there used to be just one ATA connector for hard drives. Then a smaller, 'Serial ATA' was introduced, so we decided to call the older, parallel one Parallel ATA (PATA)
- a bunch of these are specific enough to be jargon