Adjacent Words

Category definitions

	Tweet

Webster's 1828 Dictionary

CATEGORY, n. In logic, a series or order of all the predicates or attributes contained under a genus. The school philosophers distributed all the objects of our thoughts and ideas into genera or classes. Aristotle made ten categories, viz. Substance, quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, time, place, situation and habit.

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

n
1: a collection of things sharing a common attribute; "there are two classes of detergents" [syn: class, category, family]
2: a general concept that marks divisions or coordinations in a conceptual scheme

Merriam Webster's

noun (plural -ries) Etymology: Late Latin categoria, from Greek kat?goria predication, category, from kat?gorein to accuse, affirm, predicate, from kata- + agora public assembly, from ageirein to gather Date: 1588 1. any of several fundamental and distinct classes to which entities or concepts belong 2. a division within a system of classification

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. (pl. -ies) 1 a class or division. 2 Philos. a one of a possibly exhaustive set of classes among which all things might be distributed. b one of the a priori conceptions applied by the mind to sense-impressions. c any relatively fundamental philosophical concept. Derivatives: categorial adj. Etymology: F catégorie or LL categoria f. Gk kategoria statement f. kategoros accuser

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Category Cat"e*go*ry, n.; pl. Categories. [L. categoria, Gr. ?, fr. ? to accuse, affirm, predicate; ? down, against + ? to harrangue, assert, fr. ? assembly.] 1. (Logic.) One of the highest classes to which the objects of knowledge or thought can be reduced, and by which they can be arranged in a system; an ultimate or undecomposable conception; a predicament. The categories or predicaments -- the former a Greek word, the latter its literal translation in the Latin language -- were intended by Aristotle and his followers as an enumeration of all things capable of being named; an enumeration by the summa genera i.e., the most extensive classes into which things could be distributed. --J. S. Mill. 2. Class; also, state, condition, or predicament; as, we are both in the same category. There is in modern literature a whole class of writers standing within the same category. --De Quincey.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

(categories) Frequency: The word is one of the 3000 most common words in English. If people or things are divided into categories, they are divided into groups in such a way that the members of each group are similar to each other in some way. This book clearly falls into the category of fictionalised autobiography... The tables were organised into six different categories... = class N-COUNT

Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms

n. 1. Class, head, division, order, rank. 2. Head of predication, predicable, predicament (predicate), leading predicate, universal aspect, supreme distinction, primitive or elemental or elementary relation.

Moby Thesaurus

area, blood, bracket, branch, caste, clan, class, classification, department, division, estate, grade, group, grouping, head, heading, kin, kind, label, league, level, list, listing, order, pigeonhole, position, predicament, race, rank, ranking, rating, rubric, section, sector, sept, set, sort, sphere, station, status, strain, stratum, subdivision, subgroup, suborder, tier, title, type, variety