In conventional studies, metonymy interpretation has been carried out by using a hand-built database that includes relationships between words concerned with metonymy, such as a special knowledge base of metonymy and a semantic network. However, these relationships between words are diverse, and it is difficult to manually make a detailed database. Therefore, in this paper we interpret metonymy by using examples in the form of noun phrases such as "Noun X no Noun Y (Noun Y of Noun X)" and "Noun X Noun Y, " instead of a hand-built database. This method has two advantages. One is that a hand-built database of metonymy is not necessary because we use examples. The second is that we can interpret newly-coined metonymies by using a new corpus. In experiments using this method on 23 metonymy sentences taken from textbooks, we correctly judged 17 sentences to be metonymy sentences and correctly interpreted 7 of them.