The word 'type' comes from the Greek word 'typos', meaning a blow, mark of the blow (imprint), figure, or outline. It is commonly accepted that the concept of type deals with the general underlying structure or form characterizing the members of a class, kind or group. The word itself, however, has also come to be synonymous with model, pattern, guide, or mold.

Type can be presented as a Platonic idea. Joshua Reynolds used to admonish his students to search out the inner truth of the things they would paint. Real objects were defective models of a pure essence that characterized each manifestation, and the lot of the painter was to seek the essence and portray it - to paint a tree in general rather than any tree in particular. Presumably, this idea of 'what is a tree in general' allowed a person to determine that this six foot specimen with thin red leaves, and that sixty foot specimen with broad green leaves, are both trees. There is an underlying structure - a treeness - captured in either form. It would be quite correct to say that both are examples of the same 'type of plant.'  

However, at the same time it is possible to refer to each example as a different ‘type of tree.'  

The concept of type is ostensibly rooted in the notion of the group. Its very existence seemingly depends on the identifications of certain commonalities among numbers of things. Only by an act of comparison can an object be said to be of a type. However, consideration of the variety of available bases for comparison can lead to a provocative occurrence. Pursuing, for example, an enumeration of possible housing types, one might at first speak generally of private or public housing – referring to the classifier of ownership. As the precision of the grouping increases new strata of classifiers appear. A more specific classification based on configuration might identify detached housing, row housing, block housing, or slab housing. A continuing effort at narrowing the means of definition more and more could conceivably pare the initial typal group down close to its constituent parts. The final groups might well be particular housing structures, or even specific single houses. To paraphrase the writer Raphael Moneo, the concept of type, which appears to originate in the group and a denial of individuality, eventually returns to its origins in the characteristics of the individual artifact.^[2]

A study of types is therefore neither exclusively a study of groups, nor of the individual objects which comprise them, but rather a study of the dialog between the group and its members. To understand the concept of type is to understand an essential sameness that can exist between two or more completely original artifacts. It is to understand the nature of that bond which manifests itself as an underlying structural similarity. It should be the role of typology, as the study of types, to investigate this phenomenon.

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