#autonym

• Autonym — The name that a linguistic, ethnic, or cultural community assigns to itself in its own language, as opposed to an exonym (the name given by outsiders); a word used self-referentially to designate its own structural entity. In linguistics, it also describes the use of a term to represent itself from a formal standpoint, rather than to denote the real-world object or concept it typically signifies.
• Autonymy — The structural or metalinguistic relationship in which a linguistic sign, word, or lexical unit directly designates or represents itself within an utterance, serving as its own referent instead of indicating the real-world object or concept it typically denotes. In lexicography, this fundamental phenomenon forms the basis for defining headwords, where the analyzed term becomes an object of formal study, often graphically distinguished by italics, bold text, or quotation marks to signal its departure from standard referential usage.