Comments on What is the term for a word that is an instance of itself?
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What is the term for a word that is an instance of itself?
Some words are examples of the concept they name. Examples:
- "Word" is a word.
- "Noun" is a noun.
- "Eggcorn" is an eggcorn (a mistaken word that sounds like and has some connection to another word) for "acorn."
- "Mondegreen" is a mondegreen; the word comes from mishearing the song line "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen."
What is the word for words of this kind? One site that I found gives "word that describes itself" as one of the meanings of "autonym," but I can't find any other confirmation of this usage.
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The term for this is autological word.
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.)
Source: Wikipedia
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