Misnomer

A misnomer is the wrong name or term for something; a misleading name, often idiomatic.

Some sources of misnomers include

• A word used in ignorance of the true meaning.
• An older name being retained as the thing named evolved (e.g., pencil lead, tin can, fixed income markets, mince meat pie, steamroller). This is essentially a metaphorical extension with the older item standing for anything filling its role.
• A name being based on a similarity in a particular aspect (e.g. asteroids look like stars from Earth, the settled portions of Greenland are greener than the rest)
• A difference between popular and technical meanings of a term. For example a koala "bear" looks and acts much like bears, but from a zoologist's point of view they are quite distinct. Similarly, fireflies fly, ladybugs look and act like bugs and peanuts look and taste like nuts. The technical sense is often cited as the "correct" sense, but this is a matter of context.
• An older name being retained even in the face of newer information (e.g., Chinese checkers, Arabic numerals).
• Ambiguity (e.g., a parkway is generally a road with park-like landscaping, not a place to park).

Examples

• Anti-Semitism is prejudice against Jews, not all Semites.
• Arabic numerals originated in India, not in the Arab world.
• Asteroids are small planets, not star-like objects as their name suggests.
• In baseball, the statistics on base percentage and slugging percentage are not percentages but averages.
• Catgut is made from sheep intestines.
• Chinese checkers is not Chinese (or even Asian) in origin.
• A coconut is not a nut, but a fruit.
• Lead crystal is not a crystaline solid but an amorphous one—a glass.
• Dry cleaning immerses clothes in liquid solvents that are anything but dry.
• Fibonacci numbers were originally described by Pingala.
• Fireflies are beetles, not flies, though they do fly.
• Fixed income markets no longer deal predominately with fixed (known) payments.
• Fullscreen is a term commonly used for home viewing releases (DVD, VHS, etc.) of theatrical films to differentiate from their widescreen counterpart. Yet, due to the rising popularity of 16:9 HDTV sets, it is, for the most part, the widescreen versions that are technically "fullscreen" (depending on their original aspect ratio.) Plus, most fullscreen versions of modern films, are in fact cut, zoomed, and panned versions of the original widescreen, so while the image fills a 4:3 screen, it is not in fact a "full" picture. The more correct term is "Pan and scan".
• The fundamental theorem of algebra, though a theorem of algebra, may be proved by various non-algebraic means. This leads to the notion that it is "really" a theorem of analysis (or topology, etc.) and not of algebra. The deeper point that disparate fields of mathematics are connected in non-obvious ways remains valid, but designating the "fundamental theorem of algebra" a misnomer is debatable.
• Greenland is mostly arctic and Iceland is mostly tundra.
• Guinea pigs are not pigs, nor are they from Guinea.
• The Hundred Years' War was actually a series of separate campaigns and battles which continued for 116 years (1337 to 1453).
• The Hollandaise sauce, which is french.
• Kansas City is a city in Missouri. (Kansas City, Kansas is a suburban outgrowth of Kansas City, Missouri on the other side of the state line. Kansas City, KS has become a large city in and of itself. See also Kansas City, Kansas).
• Koala bears are marsupials not closely related to the Ursid family of bears.
• Laramie, Wyoming is not in Laramie County though there is such a county in Wyoming
• The "lead" in pencils is made of graphite and clay, not lead, though lead was originally used for the same purpose.
• A College lecturer in the University of Oxford is paid to give tutorials, not lectures (most lectures are in fact given by College tutors).
• At Cambridge University, the May ball and May Bumps (boat race) take place in June.
• Mustang horses in North America are often referred to as "wild horses" even though they are not, in fact, wild. They are descended from domesticated horses, and are actually feral.
• Newfoundland was considered newly found by those who so named it, but had first been inhabited at least 5,000 years before.
• The Nintendo GameCube is not actualy a cube because the sides are not all squares
• Northwestern University is in northeastern Illinois, a midwestern state. Illinois was, however, part of the historical Northwest Territory.
• The Oktoberfest beer festival actually begins in September.
• Panama hats are from Ecuador, not Panama.
• Peanuts are legumes, not nuts.
• Podcasting neither relates to just the iPod, nor does the technology involve any casting as the consumers pull audio data onto their audio players.
• A quantum leap, in vernacular usage, often means an abrupt large change; but in the original definition from physics it refers to a smallest possible change.
• A radiator doesn't radiate, it works by convection.
• Reduplication, a term in linguistics actually stands for duplication (and not fourfold repetition).
• Scripting language is often used to describe the properties of some implementation of a programming language, or the original intent of the designer of the language, and not the language itself.
• Aesop's fable of the sour grapes hinges on an after-the-fact denial of one's desire for an unattainable result; yet in popular usage, "sour grapes" often refers to ungracious complaints about failure to acquire a desirable result, typically without any sort of denial of one's desire for the result.
• Several sports teams' names are misnomers, including the Detroit Pistons, who actually play in Auburn Hills, not Detroit, the Washington Redskins who play in Landover, Maryland and the Los Angeles Angels who play in Anaheim, California.
• In common usage, a "steep" learning curve implies a difficult learning problem; but on the actual learning curve graph, a steep curve describes a rapid reduction in production cost per unit produced, indicating rapid (easy) learning by the production staff.
• Tin foil is almost always made of aluminium, whereas Tin cans made for the storage of food products are made from steel plated in a thin layer of tin.
• The tremolo arm on guitars is used to produce vibrato; not tremolo. The correct term is "vibrato arm".
• The neighborhood of Whitehaven in Memphis, Tennessee has a mostly black population.

See also

• Malapropism
• Generic trademark