Word sense
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A word sense is one of the meanings of a word.
For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word play1, each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence. For example:
We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater.
The children went out to play in the park.
In each sentence we associate a different meaning of the word "play" based on hints the rest of the sentence gives us.
Computers or people that read words one a time must use a process called word sense disambiguation to find the correct meaning of a word.
Polysemy is the property of having multiple senses. It differs from homonymy, where two different words (lexemes) happen to have the same spelling and pronunciation.
[edit] See also
- semantics -- study of meaning
- lexical semantics -- the study of what the words of a language denote and how it is that they do this
- sememe -- unit of meaning
- linguistics
- sense and reference
[edit] External links
- ”I don’t believe in word senses” -- Adam Kilgarriff (1997)
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