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Polysemy (/ p ə ˈ l ɪ s ɪ m i / or / ˈ p ɒ l ɪ ˌ s iː m i /; [1] [2] from Ancient Greek πολύ-(polý-) 'many' and σῆμα (sêma) 'sign') is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings.
Polysemy is the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings, and a polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. The word "polysemy" comes from the Greek for "many signs." The adjective forms of the word include polysemous or polysemic.
Polysemy is characterized as the phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses. It is distinguished from monosemy, where one word form is associated with a single meaning, and homonymy, where a single word form is associated with two or several unrelated meanings.
The meaning of POLYSEMOUS is having multiple meanings.
Polysemy occurs when a word form carries more than one meaning. English has a very large stock of word forms, so its lexicon is relatively free of polysemy compared with many languages. Polysemy is exemplified by words like "run" and "set" each of which has a very large number of senses, many of which seem unrelated.
Polysemy, derived from the Greek roots ‘poly’ (many) and ‘sema’ (sign), refers to a word or phrase that has multiple related meanings. Unlike homonyms (words that sound and/or look the same but have unrelated meanings), polysemous words contain meanings that bear a logical connection to each other.
One of the concepts used by linguists (people who study the way languages work) is polysemy — it's an ambiguous quality that many words and phrases in English share. Generally, polysemy is distinguished from simple homonyms (where words sound alike but have different meanings) by etymology.
Polysemy occurs when a word form carries more than one meaning. English has a very large stock of word forms, so its lexicon is relatively free of polysemy compared with many languages. Polysemy is exemplified by words like "run" and "set" each of which has a very large number of senses, many of which seem unrelated.
The current literature approaches polysemy from different perspectives and research traditions, including lexicography, formal semantics, cognitive linguistics, distributional semantics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics.
Polysemy is the type of lexical ambiguity where a word has multiple distinct but related interpretations.