I can’t help thinking that there is a grammatical word for a word that IS itself. The same way that ornomatopeia is a word for a word that sounds like itself. I’m thinking of a word like ‘noun’ for instance. The word itself is a noun, so it is itself. Is there a word for that or am I going crazy?
word?
yes there is a specialized word for it. I cannot find it right now, but there is one. I will try to find it if nobody comes up with it.
It seems like there would be too few instances of this for a separate word to be necessary. I can only think of a few off-hand: someone named “Name,” a document entitled “Title,” and (as Kilvert’s Pagan says) the word “word.”
Oh, but it appears that Sapo has proven my guess wrong. I hope he finds it–I’m curious.
Question?
Autological!
ETA: Autological word - Wikipedia
FETA: a list of such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autological_words
This is usually used to describe adjectives that describe themselves, but I guess it could extend to nouns. A word that doesn’t describe itself is heterological. If you want to have a bit of fun, try to figure out whether the word heterological is heterological.
The wiki entry explains why this is so. The list of autological nouns is almost silly.
QED, what terms were you searching? I got it in no time searching for “pollysyllabic” which I remembered as an obvious example.
Brilliant, thank you!
I searched for forms of self-referencing and found a Wiki article which led me, in turn, to the article on autological words. A little less direct, to be sure.
Would that be a parrot with a multisyllabic name?
No, clearly that’s a parrot with an amusing bill. 