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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 apply to itself. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a palindrome, "long" is a short word, "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable, "hyphenated" is not hyphenated, and, inversely, "non-hyphenated" is 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]
- ^ "homological", The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (2005), ed. Simon Blackburn, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press
- ^ 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)