A term you'll meet in rhetoric and literary tropes.
Metonymy and synecdoche are two of the most useful and most confused terms in literary analysis. They both involve calling one thing by the name of another, and they often look almost identical in practice. The distinction is real, however, and worth keeping straight.
Metonymy substitutes the name of one thing for another based on association — the two are not parts of each other, they are just regularly found together.
The link is contextual or conventional. Crowns are associated with monarchs by long tradition; nobody confuses the metal with the person.
Synecdoche, by contrast, substitutes a part for the whole (or, sometimes, the whole for a part).
The link is one of part to whole, not mere association.
Some examples blur the line. Is "the crown" a part of the monarchy or merely associated with it? Most rhetoricians treat it as metonymy because the crown is a regalia object, not a literal piece of the institution. But this is the kind of case where critics differ.
A useful test: ask whether the substituted noun could be physically detached from the thing it stands for and still be recognizable as that thing's component. Hands can be removed from sailors; the sailor is still a person with hands as parts. Crowns can be removed from monarchs; the monarch isn't a person who is partly a crown.
Modern criticism — especially structuralist criticism (Jakobson, Lacan) — gives these terms heavy theoretical weight. Roman Jakobson argued that metonymy and metaphor are the two basic poles of language itself: metaphor works by similarity, metonymy by contiguity. Some critics extend this further: realist prose, in this account, is fundamentally metonymic (one detail evokes the world it belongs to), while symbolist poetry is fundamentally metaphoric.
For literary analysis, you don't need to take these large claims on faith. The basic distinction — association vs. part-for-whole — gives you a sharper vocabulary for what figurative language is doing.
When you spot a substitution in a text, ask: is the substituted noun a part of the thing it stands for, or just associated with it? If part, synecdoche. If associated, metonymy. Then ask what the substitution does that the literal noun couldn't — what does it foreground, hide, compress, or charge? Tropes don't just sit on the page; they reshape attention.
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