autotelic
/ˈɔːtəˌtɛlɪk/
autotelic adjective: containing its own meaning or purpose; deriving meaning and purpose from within.
Adjective
autotelic (comparative more autotelic, superlative most autotelic)
- Containing its own meaning or purpose; deriving meaning and purpose from within.
- It is possible that these three people have jobs that are more autotelic than those of the rest of this group; that they have more responsibility, more initiative and challenge at their workplace than is usual for employees of their type.1988, Antonella Della Fave, Fausto Massimini, 12: Modernization and the changing contexts in work and leisure, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (editors), Optimal Experience...
- Chess itself, however – the playing of the game – is most frequently engaged in, as we say, for its own sake, as an autotelic activity rather than as a teleological one. The majority of utterances of a language are teleological, aiming at informing […]2012, J.F. Rosenberg, Linguistic Representation, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 6
- Of or pertaining to the quality of (a thing's) being autotelic.
- The autotelic score was negatively correlated with the anxiety/ambiguity score r = −.57 and negatively correlated with the boredom/rigidity score r = −.36.1988, Kevin Rathunde, Optimal experience and the family context, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (editors), Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in...
- Not motivated by anything beyond itself; thematically self-contained.
- “Running Water Music II” represents a contemporary version of the autotelic poem, freer than its modernist predecessors to assert connections, celebrate openly, declare connections between self and world, but bound by semantic and imagistic frames that derive from a single source.1989, Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century, Cambridge University Press, published 1991, →ISBN, page 112
Noun
autotelic (plural autotelics)
- An autotelic person, a person with an autotelic personality.
- Measuring autotelic personality similarly with young adults, Hektner (1996) confirmed that autotelics were least happy and motivated in apathy (low-challenge, low-skill) situations, whereas nonautotelics (those least motivated in high-challenge, high-skill situations) did not find the apathy...2014, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Springer, page 254
- First of all, it can be inferred that both autotelics and non-autotelics designated the following English activities when their concentration, interest and attention were the highest: communicating in English, also with native speakers, watching English films and programmes, reading authentic...2015, Beata Telążka, “A Selective Study on Subjective Attitudes and Objective Achievement of Autotelic and Non-autotelic Students of English as a Foreign Language”, in Ewa Piechurska-Kuciel...
Antonyms of autotelic
- non-autotelic
- nonautotelic
Forms of autotelic
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more autotelic |
| superlative | most autotelic |
| Noun | |
| plural | autotelics |
Origin of autotelic
From Ancient Greek αὐτός (autós, “self”) + τέλος (télos, “result; end”); compare auto- and telic. From early 20th century.
Questions about autotelic
- What does autotelic mean?
- Autotelic means containing its own meaning or purpose; deriving meaning and purpose from within.
- What part of speech is autotelic?
- Autotelic can be an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce autotelic?
- Autotelic is pronounced /ˈɔːtəˌtɛlɪk/.
Words near autotelic in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: autotelic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-autotelic.wav.
Cite this entry: “autotelic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/autotelic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.