Predicable

Part of speech: adjective, noun

Definitions

1. Capable of being truthfully stated or affirmed about a subject ; one of the five classes of attribute in Aristotle's logic, such as genus, species or property
2. Able to be attributed to a subject as a quality or statement ; any of the five categories of predicate that Aristotle classified, including genus, species and accident
3. Suitable for being said of something as a characteristic ; a term in Aristotelian logic naming one of five kinds of predicate, like genus or difference

Etymology: "Predicable" comes from Latin "praedicabilis," meaning "that can be affirmed" or "that can be asserted," formed from "praedicare" ("to proclaim, declare") plus the suffix "-abilis" ("able to be"). The Latin verb itself is built from "prae" ("before, publicly") and "dicare" ("to make known, dedicate"), so the word's core idea is something that can be openly stated. Its real home was logic. Aristotle's logic had long classified what can be said of a thing, and medieval scholastic philosophers developed this into a formal scheme of "predicables," the five ways a term can relate to a subject: genus, species, difference, property, and accident. In that technical sense, the noun names one of these categories, and the adjective describes something that can be predicated of a subject in this way. English borrowed the word in the 1600s, mostly in philosophical and logical writing, and it stayed largely there. Its everyday cousin "predictable," which means "able to be foretold," is a different word that arose from the same stock of Latin "praedicere" but developed separately, so the two are easily confused.

Synonyms: predictable