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Autological word

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Anautological word (orhomological word)^[1] expresses a property that it also possesses. For example the word "pentasyllabic" has five syllables, the word "writable" is writable, and the word "English" is in English.

The opposite, a heterological word, does not apply to itself. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a palindrome, "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable, "non-hyphenated" is hyphenated, "long" is a short word, and "hyphenated" is not hyphenated.

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]

• Metaplasm
• Self-reference
• Appendix:English autological termsonWiktionary

• 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")

Look up autological in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Look up Appendix:Autological words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Henry Segerman: A list of autological words
• A brief look into the different types of autology by Ionatan Waisgluss