1

The Wiktionary definition of sesquipedalianism, usage (2), is given as follows:

(countable) A very long word.

And wouldn't you know it, sesquipedalianism is a very long word!

Sesquipedalianism is a sesquipedalianism.

This observations brings me to the peculiar but fascinating question of whether a word that literally describes itself has been identified by some general category of words, which may itself have been given a term.

brainchild
  • 275
  • Does this answer your question? What do you call a word that is an example of itself? (itself closed as a duplicate) (as was Is there a word that describes the phenomenon of a word being an example of what it ...) – Edwin Ashworth May 01 '20 at 11:12
  • ... And What is a catchy word that means self-descriptive / non-self-descriptive? was perhaps the first. Duplicates should not be allowed to burgeon. – Edwin Ashworth May 01 '20 at 11:18
  • 1
    @Edwin Some of these questions are essentially the same. A few notes: 1) The response provided here is more comprehensive than for any of the other questions. 2) The current custom of employing vague and circuitous titles makes difficult searching for an existing instance of the question beforehand, and thereby makes the proliferation of duplicates largely unavoidable. – brainchild May 01 '20 at 13:49
  • Yes, the comment is really for people knowing the answer 'autologous' / 'autological' and not bothering to back-check for duplicates. That gives a far easier search. However, you ask for a name, not whether any one-word answer is itself polysemous, and not for a list of examples. Hence, a multi-duplicate. – Edwin Ashworth May 01 '20 at 15:17
  • @Edwin: I can accept the duplicate suggestions if you wish. However, the answer to this question is very complete compared to the very terse one to the other question, which is itself furthermore already marked as a duplicate. As such, I wonder about the rationale underlying such a choice. Respecting titles, moderators and answerers might encourage questioners to use helpful titles, and as well might modify them when necessary, passing the benefit to everyone from avoiding the original submission of duplicate questions. – brainchild May 02 '20 at 09:42
  • Indeed. I can't do much about the wealth (wrong connotation) of useless titles, though I've amended quite a few. However, I try to cut out a lot of bloat, for instance n + 1 answers of 'autologous'. Your question '[What is] term for a word that describes itself?' is certainly a duplicate question, multi. The fact that an answer here adds background you didn't ask for, and which may not appear at any previous thread (but have you bothered to check them all?), is not the main factor. – Edwin Ashworth May 02 '20 at 13:08
  • 2
    @Edwin My only point is that when a question is marked a duplicate of another, I would suggest a preference that whichever one is chosen 1) have a useful, search-friendly title, which could be given as late as when the duplicate is proposed, 2) have a comprehensive answer, even if part of the appeal of that answer is its greater level of detail than strictly required, and 3) has not been already marked a duplicate of yet another question. – brainchild May 03 '20 at 06:26

1 Answers1

1

They are called autological words.

Autological word:

An autological word (also called homological word)1 is a word that expresses a property that it also possesses (e.g. the word "short" is short, "noun" is a noun, "English" is English, "pentasyllabic" has five syllables, "word" is a word). The opposite is a heterological word, one that does not apply to itself (e.g. "long" is not long, "monosyllabic" has five syllables).

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

One source of autological words is ostensive definition: the reference to a class of words by an example of the member of the class, as it were by synecdoche: such as mondegreen, oxymoron, eggcorn, bahuvrihi, etc. A word's status as autological may change over time. For example, neologism was once an autological word but no longer is; similarly, protologism (a word invented recently by literary theorist Mikhail Epstein) may or may not lose its autological status depending on whether or not it gains wider usage — Wikipedia

Autological words:

Most words have a rather abstract connection to the things they describe. The word “yellow” is not actually yellow. The word “square” is not a square. Nor do we expect them to be. That’s the way of the world and the arbitrary nature of language. But some words do embody the properties they denote. We call them autological words, and they are a self-centered, self-referential bunch. Here are 17 of them.

  1. Word: Yup, that’s what it is.

  2. English: Well, it ain’t French.

  3. Erudite: It is a very scholarly word, this word that means scholarly.

  4. Noun: Verb, adjective, and adverb are nouns too.

  5. Buzzword: Been hearing this everywhere.

  6. Cutesy: Barfsy.

  7. Polysyllabic: Lots of syllables in this one.

  8. Sesquipedalian: A term for “long word” from the Latin for “a foot and a half long.”

  9. Unhyphenated: And should remain so.

  10. Magniloquent: Grandiose and pompous indeed.

— Mental Floss

Decapitated Soul
  • 16,598