Autological word

An autological word (or homological word) expresses a property that it also possesses. For example the word "pentasyllabic" has five syllables, the word "writable" is writable, and the word "English" is in English.

The opposite, a heterological word, does not apply to itself. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a palindrome, "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable, "non-hyphenated" is hyphenated, "long" is a short word, and "hyphenated" is not hyphenated.

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.