phantonym

Meanings

1. A word that appears to mean one thing but actually means something else. Such terms are predisposed toward catachrestic use (including malapropisms) by speakers and writers.

Etymology

From phant(om) + -onym, with self-aware influence from antonym; Macmillan Dictionary reports that corpus searches have found that the word seems to have been coined several times [probably independently], with several meanings all related to wordplay, accidental gaps, or catachresis, as long ago as 1993 (by Irwin M. Berent, referring to comical neologisms such as bebig, analogous to embiggen) and most recently in 2009, by Jack Rosenthal, as an -onym term for words whose sound or appearance makes them liable to be used catachrestically.