A
meronomy or
partonomy is a type of
hierarchy that deals with part–whole relationships, in contrast to a
taxonomy whose categorisation is based on discrete sets. These conceptual structures are used in
linguistics and
computer science, with applications in
biology. The part–whole relationship is sometimes referred to as
HAS-A, and corresponds to object composition in
object-oriented programming. The study of meronomy is known as
mereology, and in linguistics a
meronym is the name given to a constituent part of, the substance of, or a member of something. "X" is a meronym of "Y" if an X is a part of a Y.