Word sense

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 play[1], 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

Linguistics portal

• semantics - study of meaning
• lexical semantics - the study of what the words of a language denote and how it is that they do this
• word sense disambiguation - the task of automatically associating a sense with a word in context
• 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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