In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, the word "" may have over 50 senses in a dictionary, each with a distinct meaning depending on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows:
In each sentence, different collocates of "play" indicates its different meanings.
Word-sense disambiguation is a process used by people and computers to determine the intended meaning of a word. It relies on context, such as adjacent words, phrases, purpose, the known or probable purpose, and register of the conversation, or document, and orientation, to narrow down the possible senses to the most likely one. This process is context-sensitive.
Advanced semantic analysis has led to a distinction between word senses that correspond to either a seme (the smallest unit of meaning) or a sememe (larger unit of meaning). Polysemy refers to the property of a word or phrase having multiple semes or sememes, resulting in multiple senses.
In language, words often have related senses within a semantic field, with one sense being broader and another narrower. This pattern is common in technical jargon, where a word may have a narrower sense for a specialized audience compared to a general audience. For example, in linguistics, "orthography" will often be glossed for spelling, casing, spacing, hyphenation, and punctuation, making it a hypernym of "spelling". This pattern is not limited to jargon and can be found in general vocabulary as well. Natural language relies on context for implicit meaning, unlike programming languages that prioritize explicitness about hyponymy and hypernymy, way more than programming languages do, meaning is within a context. Examples include variations in the senses of "wood wool" and "bean" and the following:
Usage labels of "sensu" plus a qualifier, such as "sensu stricto" ("in the strict sense") or "sensu lato" ("in the broad sense"), are used to specify the intended meaning in a text.
Polysemy refers to the phenomenon where a word or phrase has multiple related meanings stemming from a common historical origin. In the medical field, broad terms are often followed by qualifiers to specify certain conditions or anatomical locations, making them polysemic. Older conceptual words are typically highly polysemic, often extending beyond shades of similar meanings into ambiguity.
Homonymy refers to the phenomenon where two distinct words (lexemes) share the same spelling and pronunciation.