Meaning & use
meta
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referring to itself or to the conventions of its own genre, in a self-aware or self-referential way
See it in a sentence
The movie gets very meta when the characters start discussing the movie they're in.
Writing a joke about how hard it is to write jokes felt a little meta.
A note on using this word
Originally a prefix meaning 'beyond' (as in 'metaphysics'), 'meta' became a standalone informal adjective for anything that comments on itself.
Words with a similar meaning
self-referential
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
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