I’m sticking with grammar words this week. Assuming you’re still here, an autological word is a word, usually an adjective (i.e. a describing word like ‘beautiful’ or ‘transparent’) that expresses a property it also possesses. Got it? Nope? Let’s look at an example – ‘word’ is autological. Because the word ‘word’ is also a word.
Assuming that didn’t make your head explode, here are some slightly less ridiculous examples:
‘longer’, because it’s a longer word than ‘long’
‘elongated’, because it’s an elongated version of ‘long’
pentasyllabic (which has nothing to do with ‘long’), because it means having five syllables, and it has five syllables.
BOOM.
You can find lots more examples of autological words here to impress your friends with (unless your friends are cool).
Let’s not forget the etymology (god forbid!). In this case ‘auto’ as a prefix means ‘self’ (like ‘automobile’ i.e. something that moves by itself, or autopilot i.e. flying itself). And ‘logical’ means ‘true’ (kind of).
Autological words are also called homological words, ‘homos’ being the Greek word for ‘same’. The opposite of an autological word is a heterological one, which, you can probably guess, is where the meaning of the word doesn’t apply to itself. Like ‘long’ which is actually a short word, and ‘monosyllabic’ which most definitely isn’t made up of one syllable.
