metaphasis
/məˈtæfəsɪs/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The accidental transposition of part of the sounds of two words in a phrase; the production of spoonerisms.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "'Oxford's great metaphasiarch', as Punch once called him, was seldom guilty of metaphasis, or the transposition of sounds. What he transposed was ideas."
- "Dr. Ashok suffered from a mild form of metaphasis. He made Spoonerisms."
- "But couldn’t it be that there is a distinction to be made between ‘metaphasis’ and ‘metathesis’? The OED defines the latter as ‘the interchange of position between sounds or letters in a word’ (my italics). An example would be Old English bridd becoming modern bird. This leaves ‘metaphasis’ free to describe what Spooner did: transpose sounds between different words, like his classic ‘our queer Dean’."
- "The technical term for this transposition is metaphasis."
- "The sister chromatid exchange (SCE) assay measures the drug-induced metaphasis SCE."
- "The reason is that homologous pairing takes place before metaphasis, during pachytene."