Inacceptable, multiword word, ...: fun with autological words

Predictably, I haven't been able to get to the end of Quine's text, short though it is, without getting side-tracked. Grelling's paradox is to blame. The paradox involves the distinction between autological words and heterological words. Autological words are those that describe themselves. For instance, the word word is also a word, the adjective English is English (it's not French, for instance), and pentasyllabic is pentasyllabic itself , as it consists of five syllables. A word is heterological if it doesn't describe itself. Thus, adjective, unlike adjectival, is heterological as it's not itself an adjective, and so are the words monosyllabic, French or long.

Kurt Grelling

The paradox named after Kurt Grelling (1886-1942), now, lies in the impossibility of answering the following question without arriving at a contradiction: What kind of word is heterological? Chances are it's heterological, as most words do not really describes themselves. But if heterological is indeed heterological, then it's actually an autological word, which is the opposite of heterological. In other words, if heterological is heterological, it is not heterological. So, is it autological, then? Let's consider this. If it's the case that heterological is an autological word, then we are forced to say that it is not an autological word, since only adjectives that fit in the frame "X is a(n) x word" (e.g. Short is a short word) can be considered autological. You see? We have a problem either way. If the word heterological is heterological, it's not. And if it's autological, it's not. That's the paradox.

I've risen to Henry Segerman's challenge to think up autological words. Here's a preliminary list, which I'll then send to him.

I'll start with 20 adjectives (or past participles):

1. burbling 
Listen to it. Doesn't this word make a gurgling, bubbling sound itself? I suppose many onomatopoeias are autological.

2. long-winded
If it's meant to convey what long does on its own, it's rather long-winded.

3. polymorhemic 
It's not just polysyllabic but it consists of several morphemes: poly-, morph, -eme and -ic.

4. listed
It's listed here.

5. included
Idem ditto.

6. near-forgotten
I'd almost forgotten about this word.

7. normal
A very normal word. There's really nothing special about it.

8. West-Vlams
That's a West-Flemish word.

9. inacceptable 
It's underlined by my spell-checker. It should be unacceptable. Segerman only accepts existing, correctly spelled words in his main list -- he also has a list of "more debatable/dodgy" ones, such as mispelt, which isn't a word. But since inacceptable really is not acceptable as a word, shouldn't he therefore include it in his list of "reasonably clearly autological words"? What a conundrum.

10. bizarre
Look at it. How many words do you know that end in -arre?

11. random
Could be just any other word, so it's pretty random.

12. decomposable
You can analyse it into its component parts, as in the following word.

13. de-compose-ed
Perhaps compose itself can also be further decomposed.

14. taggedVBN
The word tagged has here been provided with the part-of-speech tag for 'past particle', as used in the Penn Treebank project.

14. infrequent
That's not a very common word, compared to the word common, for example.

15. hyper-infrequent
Only 29 occurrences in Google for this word

16. self-rhyming
There once was a word that was self-rhyming / And that word was the word self-rhyming.

17. finite
All words come to an end, just as this one.

18. ante-penultimate
Wiktionary defines this as: "Two before the last, i.e., the one immediately before the penultimate, in a series."

19. penultimate
I guess you saw that one coming.

20. unexpected
Given the preceding two, this is not the word you had expected here, is it?


Now for some nouns...

1. derivation
This noun is derived from the verb derive.

2. compound noun
It's a noun which is consists of two free morphemes, which is precisely what we expect of a compound noun.

3. multiword word
Similar to the preceding item: any word which consists of more than one word is a multiword word.

4. haplogy
A bit of a linguist's joke: haplogy is an example of haplology, the omission of a syllable when you have two adjacent sounds or syllables in a word.

5. hapax
This is a word which occurs only once in a text.

6. unicum
Also a unique member in this list.

7. example
This word illustrates what an autological word is, doesn't it?

8. list member
It's undeniably in the list, what with having a number and all.

9. twenty-one letter series
Just count the letters.

10. 21-character sequence
Hyphens and spaces included.


If phrases, rather than words (including compound words), can be said to be autological, then it becomes quite easy to come up with autological phrases, such as beginning with a b-, starting with an s-, ending with an -e, but these couldn't be any lamer. Or how about previously ignored? This phrase used to be ignored as an example of an autological phrase, but it no longer is!