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For example, in the definition "An elephant is a large gray animal native to Asia and Africa", the word "elephant" is the definiendum, and everything after the word "is" is the definiens. [7] The definiens is not the meaning of the word defined, but is instead something that conveys the same meaning as that word. [7]
Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep. [22]
A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. [1] Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. [2]
A broadly circular definition has a larger circle of words. For example, the definition of the primary word is defined using two other words, which are defined with two other words, etc., creating a definitional chain. This can continue until the primary word is used to define one of the words used in the chain, closing the wide circle of terms.
In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows: We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater.
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. [7] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form [definition needed]. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals. [8] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate.
For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un-functions as a derivational morpheme since it inverts the meaning of the root morpheme (word) kind. Generally, morphemes that affix to a root morpheme (word) are ...
All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name". [5] The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman nom (other forms include nomme, and noun itself). The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by ...