Catégorielles

Catégorielles is a French term used to describe elements that relate to classification or category membership. The word functions as an adjective or within noun phrases and appears across disciplines such as linguistics, information science, and philosophy, to denote category-related properties, criteria, or variables. The feminine plural form is used with feminine nouns (for example propriétés catégorielles, variables catégorielles).

Etymology: The term derives from catégorie with the adjectival suffix -ielle, forming a word meaning "pertaining to categories." It is relatively rare as a standalone label and most often appears in compound expressions rather than by itself.

In linguistics, catégorielles describes grammatical categories such as gender, number, and case, and the inflectional markers that encode them. In data analysis and information science, it commonly refers to variables catégorielles or qualitative attributes that take a finite set of labels (for example couleur, type, or pays). In philosophy and knowledge representation, it may denote criteria used to sort entities into classes or to analyze the structure of a taxonomy. The term should not be confused with mathematical category theory, which is known in French as théorie des catégories and is a distinct field.

Examples include a dataset column listing color labels as rouge, bleu, vert or a discussion of propriétés catégorielles that distinguish linguistic forms across dialects. In scholarly writing, catégorielles is typically used within longer phrases rather than as a stand-alone label.