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The Categories (Greek Kategoriai; Latin Categoriae) is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions .[1] The work is brief enough to be divided, not into books as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters. The Categories places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to medieval writers as the Latin term praedicamenta). Aristotle intended them to enumerate everything that can be expressed without composition or structure, thus anything that can be either the subject or the predicate of a proposition. The text begins with an explication of what is meant by Aristotle synonymous, or univocal words, what is meant by homonymous, or equivocal words, and what is meant by paronymous, or denominative (sometimes translated derivative ) words. It then divides forms of speech as being: Either simple, without composition or structure, such as man, horse, fights, etc. Or having composition and structure, such as a man argued, the horse runs, etc. Only composite forms of speech can be true or false. Next, he distinguishes between what is said of a subject and what is in a subject. What is said of a subject describes the kind of thing that it is as a whole, answering the question what is it? What is said to be in a subject is a predicate that does not describe it as a whole but cannot exist without the subject, such as the shape of something. The latter has come to be known as inherence.

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