katagoria

Katagoria is a transliteration from Greek that can refer to two distinct terms when rendered without diacritics: κατηγορία (katigoría), meaning category or class; and καταγωγή (katagōgí, or katagōgē), meaning origin or descent. Because they share a similar transliteration, the intended sense must be inferred from context.

In the sense of category, katigoría denotes a grouping or class defined by shared properties. In philosophy and logic, it appears in discussions of universals and predicates; in science and information science it underpins taxonomies, ontologies, and data categorization; in linguistics it refers to grammatical categories such as tense, number, or mood.

In the sense of origin, katagōgí refers to provenance, ancestry, or source. It is commonly used in genealogy, anthropology, and demographics to describe where a person or thing originates, whether geographic, cultural, or familial. The term may appear in records, biographies, or heritage studies.

In Greek usage, both words are standard; in English texts the exact meaning is clarified by diacritics or by context. The non-accented form katagoria thus functions as a transliteration that can lead to ambiguity without additional information.

See also: category, origin, taxonomy, ontology, Greek language.