the rearranging of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence in linguistics
Metathesis is when sounds or syllables within a word, or words within a sentence, get rearranged from their original order. It matters because it helps linguists understand how languages naturally change over time and how people sometimes accidentally swap sounds when speaking or writing.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Metathesis (/məˈtæθəsɪs/ mə-TATH-ə-siss; from Greek μετάθεσις, from μετατίθημι "to put in a different order"; Latin: transpositio) is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous segments or syllables, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:
anemone > **anenome (onset consonants of adjacent syllables)
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).