Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An error committed in chronology by placing an event after its real date.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An error committed in chronology by placing an event after its real time.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An error in chronological ordering in which a character or an event is placed at too late a time.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek μετά (meta, "after, behind") + χρόνος (khronos, "time")

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Examples

  • There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke

    A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles Sidney Lee 1892

  • Many very able men who have preceded him in scientific labor, and who do not believe that "the bowels will be aroused into animation" by the exhibition of "a small strip of yellow glass three inches in depth, bordered by its affinitive violet," to the umbilical region, or that "Major Buckley developed one hundred and forty-eight persons so that they could read sentences shut up in boxes or nuts," would listen attentively to what he has to say on the anatomy of an atom, metachronism and "chromatic attraction."

    Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 Various

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