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Homographs (literally "same writing") are usually defined as words that share the same spelling, regardless of how they are pronounced. [note 1] If they are pronounced the same then they are also homophones (and homonyms) – for example, bark (the sound of a dog) and bark (the skin of a tree).
In biology, a homonym is a name for a taxon that is identical in spelling to another such name, that belongs to a different taxon.. The rule in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is that the first such name to be published is the senior homonym and is to be used (it is "valid"); any others are junior homonyms and must be replaced with new names.
An example is the genus Pomatia Beck, 1837, [9] which was established for a group of terrestrial snails containing as its type species the Burgundy or Roman snail Helix pomatia—since Helix pomatia was already the type species for the genus Helix Linnaeus, 1758, the genus Pomatia was an objective synonym (and useless).
The difference between a junior primary homonym and a subsequent use of a name is undefined, but it is commonly accepted that if the name referred to another species or form, gave a description, and if there is in addition no evidence the author knew that the name was previously used, it is considered as a junior homonym. Example:
This image is a derivative work of the following images: File:Homograph homophone venn diagram.png licensed with Cc-by-sa-3.0, GFDL 2009-06-28T09:00:19Z Blazotron 944x694 (36481 Bytes) {{Information |Description={{en|1=This is an Euler diagram showing the relationships between pronunciation, spelling, and meaning of words, for example, homographs, homonyms, homophones, heteronyms, and ...
Words with the same writing and pronunciation (i.e. are both homographs and homophones) are considered homonyms. However, in a broader sense the term "homonym" may be applied to words with the same writing or pronunciation. Homograph disambiguation is critically important in speech synthesis, natural language processing and other fields.
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, the masculine noun el capital means 'capital' as in 'money', but the feminine noun la capital means ...
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 ...