In linguistics, 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.

Related Terms

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.

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 - the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied.
• sense and reference

External links

• ”I don’t believe in word senses” -- Adam Kilgarriff (1997)
• WordNet(R) - A large lexical database of English words and their meanings maintained by the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory.

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