The organization in categories allows us to find products easily
The verb categorize refers to making a classification or ordering by category . The term, according to the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), comes from the English expression to categorize .
Frame something in a group
To continue with the development of the definition of categorizing, it is necessary to first delve into the idea of category . This concept has several meanings: on this occasion, we are interested in its meaning as a class , a condition or a division .
When categorizing something, therefore, it is included or framed in a certain group . Elements that are part of the same category have characteristics or properties in common .
It is important to note that technical knowledge is not always necessary to categorize a series of elements. We carry out this action from early childhood, to distinguish our parents from our siblings, our toys from food or furniture from appliances.
Some examples
Let's take the case of financing (the economic funds that a person or an organization needs to finance a commercial operation or the operation of an activity). When a financing service is requested, it can be categorized as short-term (if the money must be returned in less than a year) or long-term (if the return time is greater than one year), to mention two. odds.
Let's see what happens with the fish . It is possible to categorize this animal in different ways. If we focus on the amount of fat they have between their muscles, we can differentiate between oily fish (with a fat content greater than 5%) and white fish (with a fat content less than 5%), for example. .
One of the areas of modern life that we find difficult to do without is medicine, and it is one of the ones that has the most categories. In this great field of knowledge, which encompasses a large number of specialties, we can find types of diseases according to their causes, their routes of contagion and their severity, among many other criteria.
Benefits of categorizing
At first glance, we can say that we carry out this action in almost all areas of our lives, both academically and informally, in our daily lives. Almost naturally and instinctively, we tend to group all the data we receive from the outside, as well as those produced within our body, and little by little we create an immense base that we take as a reference to understand reality.
With respect to external stimuli, for example, we have languages, which we can categorize according to their alphabets, their antiquity or their origins, among other criteria . Even without academic or specific knowledge, we can say "that language seems oriental" or "because of its accent I think it is European." Within our language, on the other hand, we categorize different types of words into nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and more, in order to learn and use it more effectively.
The periodic table is a clear example of categorization
We also organize less objective things, such as intonations, into different groups, and thanks to that we can intuit whether two people are arguing even if we cannot hear their words clearly. Categorizing benefits us because it allows us to assign a specific place to each object, while giving it a meaning that makes sense to us . We learn the concept of seating, and there we put the chairs, the armchairs and the cinema seats, for example; Every time we see one of these products, we know we can sit on them.
Categorizing, in short, is an action that contributes to ordering information . In this way it is easy to build symbolic structures that help understanding or have a practical purpose.