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polysemy

noun
/ˈpɒ.lɪ.siː.mi/UK

Etymology

From polyseme + -y.

  1. learned borrowing from σῆμα
  2. prefixed as polyseme — “poly + seme”
  3. suffixed as polysemy — “polyseme + y”

Definitions

  1. The quality characteristic of a polyseme, a sign (such as a word or symbol) that has…

    The quality characteristic of a polyseme, a sign (such as a word or symbol) that has multiple meanings (senses), often including multiple similar ones.

    • Fifty years ago the linguist and semanticist Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy, the fact that some words have a network of multiple but related meanings, is "the pivot of semantic analysis" […]
    • Polysemy proliferates in natural language: Virtually every word is polysemous to some extent.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for polysemy. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA