Autonomic words

[ciphergoth]

To quote an earlier LJ comment of mine:

Some adjectives describe other words. "Bisyllabic" is an example, it describes words like "butter" and "football", but not "peg" or "antidisestablishmentarianism".

Some such adjectives have the weird property that they describe themselves: the best example I know of is "pentasyllabic". We'll call such adjectives "autonomic", because they name themselves.

What other autonomic words can you think of? So far we've thought of "sesquipedalian" and "short", and I'm sure there's a suitable word that means "word taken from another language" but I can't remember what it is. Any ideas?

Comments

[zotz]

Hofstadter's examples included recherché and awkwardnessful.

[adjectivegail]

*blink* 'awkwardnessful' is a word?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I suspect Hofstadter made it up for the purposes of the example. "pentasyllabic" is still far more satisfying than any of the other examples, though "TLA" is close.

[mhw.livejournal.com]

"word taken from another language"
"calque"
Etymology: French, literally, copy, from calquer to trace, from Italian calcare to trample, trace, from Latin, to trample

How about "noun" and "adjectival"?

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

English?

a few more...

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

descriptive, English, word, tla, etla, verbing

[stelio.livejournal.com]

he he. Then the word "autonomic" is an element of both the set of autonomic words and the set of words that are not autonomic. That is to say (and honestly, this sentence is meaningful) if "autonomic" is autonomic then it is autonomic, and if it's not autonomic then it isn't autonomic. Without explicitly stating which it is, it's undefined.

But aside from Bertrand-Russell-style semantics, how about: word, finite, concept (or conceptual, since you prefer adjectives), understandable, readable, common, senescent, extant.

[Oh, sorry, I know avaritia if you were wondering who I am]

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yup, the reason I didn't mention which LJ commment I was quoting was that that give the game away...

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

'text', when written, and 'written', when in text.

[selectnone.livejournal.com]

Not sure if this quite counts, but TLA is indeed a Three Letter Acronym...

[neilhudson.livejournal.com]

Mispelled. And unchambered. Unchambered is a word I invented that means "not in the dictionary".

It's always annoyed me that palindrome isn't a palindrome, and that anagram isn't a decent anagram of anything.

I'm off to yell "interjection!" at someone.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

A friend at school once came up to me while I was eating lunch to say "Non sequiter!"

[ducklofty.livejournal.com]

How about wee (in the Scottish sense of course), more satisfying that short anyway.