Nominalism

Nominalism is a way of thinking about things that says that all words and ideas are just names we give to things and that they don't have any special meaning. It's like a shortcut to describe something, because instead of having to explain the whole thing, you just give it a name. For example, if you wanted to talk about a type of tree that has red leaves, you could call it a "red-leaf tree", instead of using a lot of words to explain how it looks.