Autological word

An autological word (or homological word) expresses a property that it also possesses. For example the word "pentasyllabic" has five syllables, and the word "writable" is writable.

"Autological" redirects here. Not to be confused with Autologous or Autonym.

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 and "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.

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