Category

How to spell category

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce category

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does category mean?

1. nounA class or division of people or things sharing particular characteristics.

Category in a sentence

• Each expense was sorted into a separate category on the spreadsheet.

• The film won an award in the documentary category this year.

Where does category come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word travels back to the Greek katEgoria, which originally meant an accusation or a charge made against someone in a public setting. The verb behind it, katEgorein, literally meant 'to speak against' or 'to assert in the assembly', combining kata, meaning 'down' or 'against', with agoreuein, 'to speak in the agora', the public marketplace where Athenians gathered. The philosopher Aristotle gave the word its lasting intellectual sense when he used it to mean a class or fundamental type into which things could be sorted, and that logical meaning is the one that survives today. English picked it up in the early 1500s, mostly by way of Latin categoria and French, settling into the general sense of a group sharing common features. The spelling trap is the soft middle: the unstressed 'o' in categ-o-ry is easy to drop, so it helps to remember the same -gory ending sits in its relative 'categorical'.

How the word is built

• categor- (from Greek katEgoria: a statement, accusation, or class)
• -y (noun suffix)