What is "polysemy"

1900, from French polysémie (1897), from Medieval Latin polysemus, from Greek polysemos "of many senses," from poly- (see poly-) + sema "sign" (see semantic). Related: Polysemic.

n. (context semantics English) The ability of words, signs and symbols to have multiple meanings.

n. the ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used (in different contexts) to express two or more different meanings [syn: lexical ambiguity] [ant: monosemy]

Polysemy ( or ; from , poly-, "many" and , sêma, "sign") is the capacity for a sign (such as a word, phrase, or symbol) to have multiple meanings (that is, multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses), usually related by contiguity of meaning within a semantic field. It is thus usually regarded as distinct from homonymy, in which the multiple meanings of a word may be unconnected or unrelated.

Charles Fillmore and Beryl Atkins' definition stipulates three elements: (i) the various senses of a polysemous word have a central origin, (ii) the links between these senses form a network, and (iii) understanding the 'inner' one contributes to understanding of the 'outer' one.

Polysemy is a pivotal concept within disciplines such as media studies and linguistics. The analysis of polysemy, synonymy, and hyponymy and hypernymy is vital to taxonomy and ontology in the information-science senses of those terms. It has applications in pedagogy and machine learning, because they rely on word-sense disambiguation and schemas.