Categoria

Categoria is the term used in several Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) for 'category' or 'class'. In general, it denotes a grouping of objects, ideas, or phenomena that share defining properties. The concept appears across disciplines to organize knowledge, classify items, and support reasoning.

Etymology: from Latin catagōria and Greek katágoria, meaning a division, class, or predication.

In linguistics, grammatical categories are classes of words or inflectional features such as number, gender, tense, aspect, mood. A noun may have number and gender categories; verbs carry tense and mood.

In philosophy, Aristotle's Categories or Kant's categories refer to fundamental kinds of being and the concepts the mind uses to structure experience.

In mathematics, category theory studies abstract structures called categories, consisting of objects and morphisms with composition and identity laws. It provides a unifying language for many areas of math, with examples such as the category of sets, groups, and topological spaces, and constructs like functors and natural transformations.

In information science and library science, categories serve as ways to classify literature, products, or data, often implemented as taxonomies or subject headings.

In everyday use, the term appears in business and media to denote a product category, a genre, or a class of items defined for purposes of organization or analysis.

Overall, categoria (and its cognates) remains a foundational notion for grouping and describing relations among things, both in abstract theory and practical applications.