onomatechny

English

Etymology

Ancient Greek

Noun

onomatechny (uncountable)

1. (rare, obsolete) prognostication by the letters of a name; onomancy
   • 1904, The International Quarterly:

     To these questions it is scarcely necessary to say that all the researches of onomatechny cannot supply even the beginning of an answer

   • 1906, A Key to Puzzledom ; Or, Complete Handbook of the Enigmatic Art:

     ...believing that there was a mystical connection between things and their names. Plato was a firm believer in this form of augury or onomatechy

   • 1971, Rosemary Picozzi, A History of Tristan Scholarship:

     Finally, by combining onomatechny, history and imagination, he reconstructed what he assumed to be the original North British version of the Tristan fable

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “onomatechny”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)