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.
The opposite, a heterological word, does not have the property it names. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a palindrome, "unwritable" is writable, and "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable.
These terms were coined by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson in order to discuss a semantic paradox, akin to Russell's paradox: classifying the word "heterological" as either autological or heterological leads to a logical contradiction. This is now known as the Grelling-Nelson paradox.[2]
