An autological word (also called homological word) is a word that expresses a property that it also possesses (e.g., "word" is a word, "noun" is a noun, "English" is an English word, "
pentasyllabic" has five syllables, and "writable" is writable.) The opposite is a heterological word, one that does not apply to itself (e.g. the word "long" is not long, "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable, "dactyl" is not a
dactyl, and "misspelled" is not misspelled.)
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 human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...
for describing linguistic phenomena or classes of words, but is current in logic and philosophy where it was introduced by
Kurt Grelling
Kurt Grelling (2 March 1886 – September 1942) was a German logician and philosopher, member of the Berlin Circle.
Life and work
Kurt Grelling was born on 2 March 1886 in Berlin. His father, the Doctor of Jurisprudence Richard Grellin ...
and
Leonard Nelson for describing a semantic paradox, later known as Grelling's paradox or the
Grelling–Nelson paradox.
[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
*
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philos ...
*
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 ...
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