A figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it, e.g.
- the bottle for alcoholic drink,
- the press for journalism,
- skirt for woman,
- Mozart for Mozart’s music,
- the Oval Office for the US presidency.
A well‐known metonymic saying is the pen is mightier than the sword (i.e. writing is more powerful than warfare).
A word used in such metonymic expressions is sometimes called a metonym. … An important kind of metonymy is synecdoche , in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole (e.g. hand for worker), or vice versa. Modern literary theory has often used ‘metonymy’ in a wider sense, to designate the process of association by which metonymies are produced and understood: this involves establishing relationships of contiguity between two things, whereas metaphor establishes relationships of similarity between them.