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In , a word sense is one of the meanings of a . For example, a may have over 50 different senses of the word "", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's in a sentence, as follows:

In each sentence different collocates of "play" signal its different meanings.

People and , as they read words, must use a process called word-sense disambiguationR. Navigli. Word Sense Disambiguation: A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys, 41(2), 2009, pp. 1-69. to reconstruct the likely intended meaning of a word. This process uses context to narrow the possible senses down to the probable ones. The context includes such things as the ideas conveyed by adjacent words and nearby phrases, the known or probable purpose and register of the conversation or document, and the orientation (time and place) implied or expressed. The disambiguation is thus context-sensitive.

Advanced semantic analysis has resulted in a sub-distinction. A word sense corresponds either neatly to a seme (the smallest possible unit of meaning) or a (larger unit of meaning), and of a word of phrase is the property of having multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses.


Relations between senses
Often the senses of a word are related to each other within a . A common pattern is that one sense is broader and another narrower. This is often the case in technical , where the uses a narrower sense of a word that a would tend to take in its broader sense. For example, in casual use "" will often be glossed for a lay audience as "", but in linguistic "orthography" (comprising spelling, , spacing, , and other ) is a of "spelling". Besides jargon, however, the pattern is common even in general vocabulary. Examples are the variation in senses of the term "wood wool" and in those of the word "bean". This pattern entails that can often lack explicitness about hyponymy and hypernymy. Much more than programming languages do, it relies on context instead of explicitness; meaning is within a context. Common examples are as follows:
  • The word "diabetes" without further specification usually refers to diabetes mellitus.
  • The word "angina" without further specification usually refers to .
  • The word "tuberculosis" without further specification usually refers to pulmonary tuberculosis.
  • The word "emphysema" without further specification usually refers to pulmonary emphysema.
  • The word "cervix" without further specification usually refers to the .

Usage labels of " " plus a qualifier, such as " sensu stricto" ("in the strict sense") or " sensu lato" ("in the broad sense") are sometimes used to clarify what is meant by a text.


Relation to etymology
Polysemy entails a common historic root to a word or phrase. Broad medical terms usually followed by qualifiers, such as those in relation to certain conditions or types of anatomical locations are polysemic, and older conceptual words are with few exceptions highly polysemic (and usually beyond shades of similar meaning into the realms of being ).

is where two separate-root words () happen to have the same and .


See also
  • – study of meaning
  • lexical semantics – the study of what the words of a language denote and how it is that they do this
  • word-sense induction – the task of automatically acquiring the senses of a target word
  • word-sense disambiguation – the task of automatically associating a sense with a word in context
  • lexical substitution – the task of replacing a word in context with a lexical substitute
  • – unit of meaning
  • – the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied.
  • sense and reference
  • – a mathematical term which is the overarching generalization of the intentionality behind the class of transfers of intelligibility at two different levels of analysis.


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