To say `he spent the evening reading Shakespeare' is metonymic because it substitutes the author himself for the author's works.    From Wordnet, Princeton University. 

Your search for "metonymic" meanings instead of taking things first at face value is particularly distressing to me.    From Wordnik.com.  [Never judge a book by its nom de plume] Reference

In Morte D'Urban, we can see the extended use Powers makes of the priesthood as a kind of metonymic device to explore the themes of community, America, the spiritual/moral life.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Priestly Comedy of J. F. Powers] Reference

Put aside the metonymic swipe at the faculty lounge.    From Wordnik.com.  [Balkinization] Reference

‘Code is Law’ is also a metonymic inference referencing a paradigm.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Volokh Conspiracy » Lessig’s “Code” at 10:] Reference

In the same way, the metonymic reversal of the Duddon sonnet, because it is.    From Wordnik.com.  [Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History] Reference

The list is a bit metonymic, imho, but I'm on board with his generativity focus.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Bandwidth of Big Hair] Reference

The way in which you've orchestrated a structural quarrel between the metaphoric and the metonymic.    From Wordnik.com.  [Skinny Legs and All]

Each of the characters is metonymic of the experiences of the working classes under Thatcher's Tory government.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2008-08-01] Reference

The "purely relational metonymic contact," however, turns out to underlie and undermine the metaphorical totalization because, de Man argues, the metaphor.    From Wordnik.com.  [Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man] Reference

In its metonymic relation to the season, however, Shelley's wind, with all its surface effects, is also the recessional index of a further unseen presence.    From Wordnik.com.  [Phonemanography: Romantic to Victorian] Reference

Technically, it is not quite accurate to say, as Shattuck does at the end of his piece, that the oral is primary and holistic, the written metonymic and abstract.    From Wordnik.com.  [Rescuing Literature: An Exchange] Reference

For some people, peanut butter and jam are nostalgic triggers, and followed closely by kindergarten, strong coffee and soap operas, the metonymic chain adds up to a giant nostalgic hook.    From Wordnik.com.  [Jason Christie reads Ryan Fitzpatrick] Reference

Words in use never stay still, and in a typical metonymic shiftreinforced by a telling grammatical drift into the pluralthe word archive has come to refer also to the building's contents.    From Wordnik.com.  [languagehat.com: ARCHIVE(S).] Reference

As the inevitability of Swellfoot's fall becomes clear, Mammon turns to another symbolic body, that of the Goddess Famine, and reads her corporeal instability as metonymic for the state of Swellfoot's regime.    From Wordnik.com.  [Shelley] Reference

But at the same time books are also peculiarly interiorized objects that stray outside the metonymic logic of the souvenir and confound, as much confirm, the priority of the subject established by the souvenir.    From Wordnik.com.  [Bibliographic Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book Object] Reference

"The pen is mightier than the sword" is a metonymic adage coined by English author Edward.    From Wordnik.com.  [AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed] Reference

Instead, he's part of a team that has a metonymic relationship with the country as a whole.    From Wordnik.com.  [PopMatters] Reference

There are some instances in which the Scriptures themselves reveal the character and limit the meaning of the metonymic passages.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed] Reference

Further, nothing can be more certain than that both the phrases contrasted by Dr. Kitto are equally employed in the metonymic form.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed] Reference

And for some reason, feminine and remote, she now detested her 'hand' so much as to be unable to bring herself to the metonymic mention of it.    From Wordnik.com.  [Beauchamp's Career — Complete] Reference

It was the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton who coined the famous metonymic adage "The pen is mightier than the sword" in 1839 for his play.    From Wordnik.com.  [My Sinchew -] Reference

Their varying responses to the archetypal metonymic referent for the lives lost in the Holocaust is certainly as affecting as the falling bodies in.    From Wordnik.com.  [PopMatters] Reference

I found suggestions that it is a "metonymic occupational name," an English nickname or an anglicized form of a Gaelic personal name meaning ` life. '.    From Wordnik.com.  [VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XVII No 4] Reference

A conflation of legality and legitimacy, brilliantly explored by Carl Schmitt, is the first of three essential confusions I term "the metonymic abuses of modernity.".    From Wordnik.com.  [TELOSscope: The Telos Press blog] Reference

That word may have been seized on for its rhyme, but the result is also metonymic, since "December" summons the chilly poverty that may ensue from neglected practicalities.    From Wordnik.com.  [Poem of the week: The Epistle of Deborah Dough by Mary Leapor] Reference

Caricature is a form of metonymic distortion, much favoured by satirical humorists, which involves the distortion of some aspect of human appearance, normally physiognomy (facial features).    From Wordnik.com.  [Recently Uploaded Slideshows] Reference

Others (e.g., the extraordinary lawgivers) are, indeed, endowed with the political existential richness but, as such, they militate against the metonymic reduction of legitimacy to legality.    From Wordnik.com.  [TELOSscope: The Telos Press blog] Reference

To thematize the metonymic abuses of modernity is to disenchant the rational, wholly enlightened disenchantment that, as Adorno and Horkheimer would corroborate, practices a magic of its own.    From Wordnik.com.  [TELOSscope: The Telos Press blog] Reference

The confusion of the highest and the purest, most general form affords legality, as a particular mode of legitimacy, a chance to seize the place of the whole in an indelible metonymic displacement.    From Wordnik.com.  [TELOSscope: The Telos Press blog] Reference

Israel; but he would be certainly a very "plain man" who would infer from the universality of a passage so evidently metonymic, that that fear extended to the people of Japan on the one hand, or to the Red.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed] Reference

Using more or less the Socrates methodology of an imaginary dialog between the reader and himself, Lacan enters the world of reality using as his tools the algorithms of metonymic and metaphoric structures.    From Wordnik.com.  [MyLinkVault Newest Links] Reference

This quick recourse to history should not give one the impression that the hegemony of legality is totally assured and univocal, or that historicization is a panacea against the metonymic abuses of modernity.    From Wordnik.com.  [TELOSscope: The Telos Press blog] Reference

A gender role (taking the metonymic sign of femininity) and transcend it, since it is acquired by anti-social means.    From Wordnik.com.  ['Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business': Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's _Juvenilia_] Reference

She practices ... metonymic historiography.    From Wordnik.com.  ["And Your Little Dog Too!!!" Christina Hoff Sommers Still Wants The Ruby Slippers] Reference

"metonymic figure.".    From Wordnik.com.  [Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History] Reference

"properly" metonymic substitution.    From Wordnik.com.  [Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History] Reference