Categories

How to spell categories

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce categories

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does categories mean?

1. nounGroups or divisions of people or things sharing particular characteristics, used to organise or classify them.

Categories in a sentence

• The survey sorts respondents into four broad categories by age.

• The museum arranges its exhibits in distinct categories such as painting, sculpture, and textiles.

Where does categories come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek katēgoria, which originally meant an accusation or a statement made against someone, built from kata, meaning 'down' or 'against', and agoreuein, 'to speak in the public assembly', itself rooted in agora, the open marketplace where citizens gathered. The ancient philosopher Aristotle borrowed the term for a far more abstract purpose, using it to name the basic classes into which everything we can assert about a thing may be sorted, and that logical sense is what survived. The word passed through Latin as categoria and then into French before settling into English in the sixteenth century, by which time it simply meant a group or division of similar things. The 'against the assembly' origin explains the unexpected hard 'g' and the gor spelling in the middle. A useful memory hook is that the second vowel is an 'e', as in the root categor-, even though it sounds like a faint 'uh', which is exactly where many writers slip and put an 'a'.

How the word is built

• categor- (from Greek katēgoria: class of predicate)
• -y (noun suffix)
• -ies (plural of -y)