Logophiles may already know some of these.
Mental Floss features twenty-five words whose purpose is to describe the nature of other words.
Two examples:
EMORDNILAP
If a palindrome is a word or phrase that spells the same backwards as forwards, then an emordnilap is a word that spells a completely different word when it is reversed. So brag becomes grab, reward becomes drawer, stressed becomes desserts, and so on. Emordnilap itself is an emordnilap of course, but it’s also an ananym and an autological word.
RETRONYM
Coined by the journalist Frank Mankiewicz in the early 1980s, a retronym is a word that comes into being whenever a newer word or invention surpasses an older one, which then has to be renamed. So after electric guitars were invented, earlier non-electric guitars came to be known by the retronym acoustic guitars. The same thing happened with landline telephones, analogue clocks, field hockey, rugby union, silent films, 2D films, the French franc, British English, George Bush Sr., and the First World War, which until the outbreak of the Second World War was known simply as “The Great War.”
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