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According to Wikipedia, "A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning"

"Mondegreen" is also an example of a mondegreen, because it is a mishearing of "laid him on the green"

My question is this: Is there a word for this? That is, is there a word that describes the phenomenon of a word being an example of what it is? Are there other instances of this?

To provide an analogous example, onomatopoeia characterizes a word which sounds like the sound it describes (ex, boom, chirp).

This question, thought related, is different, I think.

Thanks!

Community
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Tupelo Thistlehead
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1 Answers1

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It's an autological word; perhaps autolog might be an acceptable noun formation (though I'm unaware that such a word has been proposed, or used):

An autological word (also called homological word) is a word that expresses a property that it also possesses. ... The word "short" is short, "noun" is a noun, "English" is English, "pentasyllabic" has five syllables, "word" is a word

The Wikipedia article, in fact, specifically mentions mondegreen as autological:

One source of autological words are archetypal words (ostensive definitions) – words chosen to describe a phenomenon by using an example of the phenomenon, which are thus necessarily autological. One such example is a mondegreen – a mishearing of a phrase, which itself is based on a mishearing of "And laid him on the green" as "And Lady Mondegreen".

Matt Gutting
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