Is there a word (or phrase) for phrases that are examples of what they describe? For example, "You the verb" to tell someone they forgot a verb in an online posting, or "spacesmakethingseasiertoread".
Learn English – Word for phrases that are examples of what they describe
phrase-requestssingle-word-requests
Related Topic
- Learn English – Word or phrase to describe a couple that is perfect
- Learn English – Word for having strong political opinions but no consistent “side”
- Learn English – When someone can speak a language very well, they are “fluent”. What if you can only understand it
- Learn English – What’s the word for an act of making people do what you want thinking its what they want
Best Answer
The most common, and most commonly understood, term is self-reference, or self-referential if you're after an adjective.
A subset of that is autograms, "sentences that describe themselves in the sense of providing an inventory of their own characters". Examples are "This sentence has exactly six words" or "This sentence employs seven e's".
For single words rather than phrases, there's also the term autological. Textbook examples of this include "polysyllabic", "pentasyllabic", "short", "sesquipedalian", and "noun".
Lastly, there's the term iconicity that generally describes "the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign (linguistic or otherwise) and its meaning". Examples include the word "bed", which some might note looks like a bed, or "looooong", made very long on purpose. Some poets, notably e e cummings, make deliberate use of visual iconicity, though auditory iconicity is more common (think onomatopoeias). Wikipedia provides this nice example of spatial iconicity: