Adjective

meta (comparative more meta, superlative most meta)

Positive meta

Comparative more meta

Superlative most meta

1. (informal) Self-referential; at a higher level
   • 2002, Robert C. Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, ISBN 079145424X, page 31:

     […] in finessing obligations you fail a "meta" kind of obligation.

   • 2006, Brendan Vaughan, What Would MacGyver Do?, ISBN 1594630240, page 186:

     Besides, I can just hear Vaughan: "Very funny, Stacey, very Charlie Kaufman-esque, very meta, very '97. I can't use it."

Anagrams

• mate, maté, meat, tame, team

Basque

Noun

meta

1. heap

Czech

Noun

meta f.

1. base (in baseball, one of the three places)

Faroese

Meta- (from Greek: μετά = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self"), is a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.

In epistemology, the prefix meta is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on). Similarly, metamemory in psychology means an individual's knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it. Furthermore, metaemotion in psychology means an individual's emotion about his/her own basic emotion, "or somebody else's basic emotion."

Another, slightly different interpretation of this term is "about" but not "on" (exactly its own category). For example, in linguistics a grammar is considered as being expressed in a metalanguage, or a sort of language for describing another language (and not itself). A meta-answer is not a real answer but a reply, such as: "this is not a good question", "I suggest you ask your professor". Here, we have such concepts as meta-reasoning and meta-knowledge.

Any subject can be said to have a meta-theory which is the theoretical consideration of its meta-properties, such as its foundations, methods, form and utility.

In Greek, the prefix meta- is generally less esoteric than in English; Greek meta- is equivalent to the Latin words post- or ad-. The use of the prefix in this sense occurs occasionally in scientific English terms derived from Greek. For example: the term Metatheria (the name for the clade of marsupial mammals) uses the prefix meta- merely in the sense that the Metatheria occur on the tree of life adjacent to the Theria (the placental mammals).

"Meta" is also gaining currency as an adjective, as well as a prefix, as in the work of Douglas Hofstadter (see below).