Katagoría

Katagoría is a term of Greek origin, commonly transliterated as katégoría in English and other languages. In Greek, it denotes a category or class—an organizing label used to group items that share common properties. The word appears in everyday Greek as well as in scholarly and analytical contexts, where it refers to a basic unit of classification.

In philosophy and logic, katēgoria (the related Greek form) has long played a central role. In Aristotelian logic, categories are fundamental kinds of predication or ways in which a subject can be described. Classical treatments enumerate a small set of basic categories—such as substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, and time—though later interpretations vary the exact list. The English word category, and its Latin predecessor categoria, derive from this Greek concept and have shaped Western approaches to classification and analysis.

Today, katagoría appears across disciplines that involve sorting, naming, and organizing phenomena. In linguistics and semantics, categories help explain how words and meanings group together. In philosophy and ontology, categorization is a methodological tool for understanding being and phenomena. In the broader sense, categories underpin taxonomies used in the sciences, libraries, and information systems, as well as everyday reasoning about objects and ideas.

Note: katagoría should not be confused with καταγωγή (origins or provenance), another Greek term with a different meaning, though the similarity in form can lead to transliteration ambiguities in cross-linguistic texts. See also category, categorization, taxonomy, and ontology.