[00:01] that's 12. [music] It's also not five, because that's four. But it is four. It's also five and 25 added together. It's more than 10 and exactly 10, because the answer can be anything so long as its meaning is the
[00:16] written with. I call expressions like these autoposical, because [music] they count themselves. Autoposigrams are different than autological words, words that [music] describe themselves as words. For example, 17-lettered is
[00:31] [music] 17-lettered. Unhyphenated is unhyphenated and writable is writable. Autoposigrams are also different than heterological words, words that do not describe themselves. Plural is not plural. Misspelled is not misspelled.
[00:46] And monosyllabic is not. Autoposigrams do not describe themselves as words, they describe their own letter count. A definite autoposigram tells you exactly how many letters it contains. [music] Eight more than nine means 17 and is
[01:00] spelled with 17 letters. An indefinite autoposigram describes how many letters it contains without giving you a specific number. Some contains some letters. More than 10 contains more than 10. In my research, I found that the
[01:13] plethora of expressions that point to their own letter counts and some of them are, in my opinion, truly autoposical. 2 cubed, the eighth prime number plus nine, words in the preamble [music] of the USA Constitution minus five, but
[01:27] some of them, like multiply three by three by three or raise five to the second power, are something else. They don't describe a number, instead they are a command to find a number, which happens to be their own letter count. So
[01:40] they aren't truly autoposical, instead they're posical question beggars, containing their own answers within themselves. But even more sinister is the Trojan gram, a word that contains not its own answer, not even its own
[01:53] opposite, but one of its enemies. If you are superstitious, do not count how many are superstitious, do not count how many letters are in the word superstitious.