category

/ˌkædəˈgɔri/

/ˈkætɪgəʊri/

Other forms: categories

A category is a group of things that share some commonality. Think of the game show "Jeopardy!," and how each column is a different category of questions — like "Literary Characters" or "Potent Potables."

The noun category has the sense of ordering or sorting. In Biology, the science of taxonomy is all about categorizing all living organisms. It might be an easier task to categorize books in a library according to genre (e.g., fiction, non-fiction, mysteries, etc.) or to categorize the shoes in your closet according to season.

Definitions of category

1. noun

   a general concept that marks divisions or coordinations in a conceptual scheme
   types:

   form, kind, sort, variety

   a category of things distinguished by some common characteristic or quality

   pigeonhole

   a specific (often simplistic) category

   rubric

   category name

   way

   a general category of things; used in the expression `in the way of'

   description

   sort or variety

   type

   a subdivision of a particular kind of thing

   antitype

   an opposite or contrasting type

   art form

   (architecture) a form of artistic expression (such as writing or painting or architecture)

   style

   a particular kind (as to appearance)

   flavor, flavour

   (physics) the six kinds of quarks

   color, colour

   (physics) the characteristic of quarks that determines their role in the strong interaction

   species

   a specific kind of something

   genus

   a class of things with common characteristics

   brand, make

   a recognizable kind

   genre

   a kind of literary or artistic work

   ilk, like

   a kind of person

   manner

   a kind

   model

   a type of product

   stripe

   a kind or category

   like, the like, the likes of

   a similar kind

   type of:

   concept, conception, construct

   an abstract or general idea inferred or derived from specific instances
2. noun

   a collection of things sharing a common attribute
   synonyms: class, family

   types:

   grammatical category, syntactic category

   (grammar) a category of words having the same grammatical properties

   paradigm, substitution class

   the class of all items that can be substituted into the same position (or slot) in a grammatical sentence (are in paradigmatic relation with one another)

   brass family

   (music) the family of brass instruments

   violin family

   (music) the family of bowed stringed instruments

   woodwind family

   (music) the family of woodwind instruments

   stamp

   a type or class

   sex

   either of the two categories (male or female) into which most organisms are divided

   declension

   a class of nouns or pronouns or adjectives in Indo-European languages having the same (or very similar) inflectional forms

   conjugation

   a class of verbs having the same inflectional forms

   denomination

   a class of one kind of unit in a system of numbers or measures or weights or money

   histocompatibility complex

   a family of fifty or more genes on the sixth human chromosome that code for proteins on the surfaces of cells and that play a role in the immune response

   case, grammatical case

   nouns or pronouns or adjectives (often marked by inflection) related in some way to other words in a sentence

   form class, part of speech, word class

   one of the traditional categories of words intended to reflect their functions in a grammatical context

   number

   the grammatical category for the forms of nouns and pronouns and verbs that are used depending on the number of entities involved (singular or dual or plural)

   person

   a grammatical category used in the classification of pronouns, possessive determiners, and verb forms according to whether they indicate the speaker, the addressee, or a third party

   gender, grammatical gender

   a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness

   tense

   a grammatical category of verbs used to express distinctions of time

   participant role, semantic role

   (linguistics) the underlying relation that a constituent has with the main verb in a clause

   type of:

   accumulation, aggregation, assemblage, collection

   several things grouped together or considered as a whole