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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Semantics and Pragmatics

Polysemy

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/pəˈlɪsəmi/nounCommon term

In linguistics & grammar, polysemy means: The situation in which one word has several related meanings, such as 'head' meaning a part of the body, the leader of a group or the top of a page.

In Turkish: çokanlamlılık

How it is used

Contrasted with homonymy, where two unrelated words share the same form (bank of a river, bank for money). Dictionaries usually list polysemous senses under one entry and homonyms as separate entries.

Example sentences

  1. The verb 'run' is a classic case of polysemy: you can run a race, a company or a computer program.

  2. Polysemy makes frequent words like 'get' and 'take' surprisingly hard to learn.

Common collocations

  • polysemous word
  • polysemy and homonymy
  • lexical polysemy
  • regular polysemy
  • ambiguityThe quality of having more than one possible meaning, caused either by a word with several senses or by a structure that can be analysed in more than one way.
  • semanticsThe study of meaning in language: what words, phrases and sentences mean, and how their meanings relate to each other and to the world.
  • synonymA word or phrase that means the same or nearly the same as another one in at least some contexts, such as big and large, or start and begin.
  • connotationThe feelings, attitudes or associations a word carries beyond its basic meaning, such as the positive feel of 'slim' compared with 'skinny'.

More terms: Semantics and Pragmatics

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