English Reference
noun

category

n.
US /ˈkætəˌɡɔɹi/ UK /kˈætɪɡəɹi/ cat·e·go·ry UK spelling categories, category's

  1. 01 B1 Intermediate Academic

    a group of things or people that are similar in some way.

    a class or division in a system of classification.

    Simple

    The competition has a separate category for children under the age of ten.

    In context

    Researchers sorted the survey responses into three distinct categories based on the participants' level of professional experience.

  2. 02 C2 Proficiency Technical Math

    a collection of objects and the connections between them that follow specific rules.

    a collection of objects together with a collection of arrows between them, where composition is associative and identity arrows exist.

    Simple

    In his advanced math class, they studied the category of all sets.

    In context

    Category theory provides a powerful framework for finding commonalities between different mathematical structures like groups and topological spaces.

Usage category one · broad category · category consist


Late Middle English, borrowed from French catégorie, from Middle French categorie, from Late Latin catēgoria (“class of predicables”), from Ancient Greek κατηγορία (katēgoría, “head of predicables”). Doublet of categoria.

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This entry
Origin Ancient Greek κατηγορία
Level B1 · Intermediate
Frequency Common
Updated