Meta is a very commonly-used term meaning self-referential.
Oxford defines it as:
(Of a creative work) referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential:
the enterprise is inherently ‘meta’, since it doesn’t review movies, for example, it reviews the reviewers who review movies
But the 'origin' section of the entry redirects here, and there's no apparant link with self-reference. It's not much help, apart from stating the usage started from the '80s.
Etymonline has an entry for the meta- prefix, but not meta the adjective.
Does anyone know exactly when and how meta came to mean self-referential?
Best Answer
It originally meant something like "after". Possibly the most prominent use of this sense is the title of Aristotle's Metaphysics, so called because it constitutes those things which are to be studied after one has learned physics.
This text wound up founding the discipline which we today call "metaphysics", and one way to describe what this subject encompasses is that it covers things at a level of abstraction above physics.
This sort of meaning became applied retroactively to the prefix, and we began building words in that sense, often by applying the root word to itself. Take for example metaknowledge, knowledge at a higher level of abstraction than standard knowledge, or knowledge about knowledge. Eventually, this reflexive sense became a new usage in its own right.