Meaning & use
category
Last updated
Meanings
nouncountable
A group of people or things considered alike in some important way.
Grammar: Often used with in or into: put items into categories.
Patterns
- a category of something
- in a category
- fall into a category
Books are sorted into categories such as fiction and travel.
Our blog posts fall into three categories.
Cats and dogs belong to the category of pets.
nouncountable
A class of competition or prize that entrants are placed in, usually by age, type or level.
Grammar: Often follows in the: she won in the youth category.
Patterns
- in the something category
- win a category
The film won in the best documentary category.
She entered the under-12 category of the race.
The festival has a category for amateur bakers.
nouncountabletechnical
In philosophy, one of the basic types into which all things can be sorted.
Grammar: A specialist use, often in the plural: Aristotle's categories.
Patterns
- categories of something
Aristotle listed ten categories of being.
Kant argued that the mind uses categories to organize experience.
Students discussed whether time is a category or a quality.
Word forms
| plural | categories |
|---|
Common combinations
- broad category
- Fruit is a broad category.
- fall into a category
- This case does not fall into either category.
- in the same category
- The two cars are in the same category.
- age category
- Runners are grouped by age category.
- category of
- This is a different category of problem.
Synonyms and how they differ
- class
- Class stresses a rank or shared type, and is also a school group, so it can be ambiguous.
- type
- Type is a casual word for a kind, while category suggests a deliberate system of sorting.
- group
- Group is the loosest word and may simply mean things gathered together.
- division
- Division suggests a part made by splitting a whole, such as in sport or a company.
Word family
- categorize verb
- to put into categories
- categorical adjective
- absolute, or relating to categories
- categorically adverb
- in an absolute and clear way
- categorization noun
- the act of sorting into groups
Commonly confused: category or catagory?
category vs catagory
Catagory is a common misspelling; the correct spelling is category, with e in the second syllable.
Practice
Which spelling is correct?
Choose one answer.
Category is spelled with the letters e, g, o, r, y at the end. The others are common misspellings.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “category”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.