Standard Lemma guide

juxtology

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.

  • /ˈd͡ʒʌkstɑləd͡ʒi/

1

noun

Meaning 1

the study in literature of juxtaposition in text and semantics.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Usage: uncountable

Examples

  • 1989 R.A. Shoaf, "Medieval Studies After Derrida, After Heidigger," in Julian N. Wasserman, Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, Syracuse University Press, 1989. Juxtology emerges from the ancient epistemology of knowledge by contraries and pursues, by comparisons - be they of thinkers and their ideas or of the minutest items of a text, syllables and even individual letters - the aleatory juxtapositions of minds or of sounds that produce the phenomena of meanings. So doing, juxtology recognizes the ontology of error and its necessity: we humans come to the truth only by wandering.
  • 2001 James L. Paxton, "Inventing the Subject and the Personification of Will in Piers Plowman," in Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith, William Langland's Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays, Psychology Press, 2001. Page 225. The allegorical tropes paranomasia and syllepsis, or rather, their compositional practice juxtology, situates Langland's cognitive allegory in the context of the poet's social and political obsession - ...

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: none provided

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

Combination of juxta- (“alongside”) + -ology ("study of"). Apparently coined by R. Allen Shoaf in the 1980s