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.
2 answers
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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An eponym is the thing after which something else is named. For example, the linguistical concept of eggcorns is named after the word eggcorn, hence the word eggcorn is the eponym of the concept.
The plain language equivalent of this is "namesake". As in, the concept is named for the sake of the word.
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