An autological word (or homological word) expresses a property that it also possesses. For example, the word "word" is a word, the word "English" is (in) English, the word "writable" is writable, and the word "
pentasyllabic" has five syllables.
The opposite, a heterological word, does not apply to itself. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a
palindrome
A palindrome (Help:IPA/English, /ˈpæl.ɪn.droʊm/) is a word, palindromic number, number, phrase, or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as ''madam'' or ''racecar'', the date "Twosday, 02/02/2020" and th ...
, "unwritable" is writable, and "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable.
Unlike more general concepts of autology and self-reference, this particular distinction and opposition of autological and heterological words is uncommon in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
for describing linguistic phenomena or classes of words, but is current in logic and philosophy where it was introduced by
Kurt Grelling and
Leonard Nelson for describing a semantic paradox, later known as Grelling's paradox or the
Grelling–Nelson paradox
The Grelling–Nelson paradox arises from the question of whether the term "non-self-descriptive" is self-descriptive. It was formulated in 1908 by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson, and is sometimes mistakenly attributed to the German philosophe ...
.
[Grelling and Nelson used the following definition when first publishing their paradox in 1908: "Let ''φ(M)'' be the word that denotes the concept defining ''M''. This word is either an element of ''M'' or not. In the first case we will call it 'autological', in the second 'heterological'." (Peckhaus 1995, p. 269). An earlier version of Grelling's paradox had been presented by Nelson in a letter to Gerhard Hessenberg on 28 May 1907, where "heterological" is not yet used and "autological words" are defined as "words that fall under the concepts denoted by them" (Peckhaus 1995, p. 277)]
See also
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Metaplasm
A metaplasm is almost any kind of alteration, whether intentional or unintentional, in the pronunciation or the orthography of a word. The change may be phonetic only, such as pronouncing ''Mississippi'' as ''Missippi'' in English, or acceptance ...
*
Self-reference
Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields.
In natural or formal languages, self-reference ...
*
Appendix:English autological terms on
Wiktionary
Wiktionary (, ; , ; rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a number o ...
References
Further reading
* Volker Peckhaus: ''The Genesis of Grelling's Paradox'', in: Ingolf Max / Werner Stelzner (eds.), ''Logik und Mathematik: Frege-Kolloquium Jena 1993'', Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1995 (Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie, 5), pp. 269–280
* Simon Blackburn: ''The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. Oxford 2005, p. 30 ("autological"), p. 170 ("heterological"), p. 156 ("Grelling's paradox")
External links
{{Wiktionary, Appendix:Autological words
*
Henry SegermanA list of autological wordsby Ionatan Waisgluss
Self-reference
Words
Types of words
Semantics
Logic
Definition