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A more restrictive and technical definition requires that homonyms be simultaneously homographs and homophones [1] —that is, they have identical spelling and pronunciation but different meanings. Examples include the pair stalk (part of a plant) and stalk (follow/harass a person) and the pair left ( past tense of leave ) and left (opposite of ...
Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
where the words are homonyms, identical in spelling and pronunciation (/ b ɛər /), but different in meaning and grammatical function. The above examples are of etymologically unrelated words. Some homographs are also etymological doublets , meaning they come from the same source and are spelt the same way in Modern English, but their distinct ...
It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought. The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo: As an attributive noun (acting as an adjective) to refer to a specific place named Buffalo, such as the city of Buffalo, New York;
Some are homonyms, such as basta, which can either mean 'enough' or 'coarse', and some exist because of homophonous letters. For example, the letters b and v are pronounced exactly alike, so the words basta (coarse) and vasta (vast) are pronounced identically. [17] Other homonyms are spelled the same, but mean different things in different genders.
For example, a word can have several word senses. [3] Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. [3] Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as bear the animal, and the verb bear); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy ...
Principal is an adjective meaning "main" (though it can also be a noun meaning the head of a college or similar institution). Principle is a noun meaning a fundamental belief or rule of action. Standard: The principal achievement of the nineteenth century is the rise of industry. Standard: He got sent to the principal's office for talking ...
Rigor is a cornerstone quality of mathematics, and can play an important role in preventing mathematics from degenerating into fallacies. well-behaved An object is well-behaved (in contrast with being Pathological ) if it satisfies certain prevailing regularity properties, or if it conforms to mathematical intuition (even though intuition can ...