Jeannette Littlemore is a Reader in Applied Linguistics and Head of the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham.

Introduction; 1. 'What those boys need is a good handbagging'. What is metonymy?; 2. 'He coughed and spluttered a lot and sneezed his lunch all over the place'. Types of metonymy and their behaviour in real-world data; 3. 'He's only bowing to his passport'. Theoretical models of metonymy: uses and drawbacks; 4. ''BBC', her mother would have said'. What do people use metonymy for?; 5. 'But what can we expect, after all, of a man who wears silk underpants?'. Playful, evaluative and creative functions of metonymy; 6. 'The Government of Britain is sort of there'. How can we identify 'metonymy'?; 7. 'I found Robbie Williams in the lounge'. How is metonymy processed in the mind?; 8. 'He started as nobody from Austria'. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation in metonymy: implications for language learning and translation; 9. 'These huts did absolutely unbelievable work'. What do we now know about metonymy?