Autological word
Word that expresses a property it also possesses From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An autological word (or homological word)[1] 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.
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The opposite, a heterological word, does not apply to itself. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a palindrome, "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 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.[2]
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