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For example, a word can have several word senses. [3] Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. [3] Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as bear the animal, and the verb bear); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy ...
If separating words using spaces is also permitted, the total number of known possible meanings rises to 58. [38] Czech has the syllabic consonants [r] and [l], which can stand in for vowels. A well-known example of a sentence that does not contain a vowel is Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick your finger through the neck."
Heterosemy contrasts with polysemy: while heterosemy implies two distinct words with the same form, polysemy implies one word with multiple meanings. For example, the word hard has the related meanings "solid" (as in a hard surface) and "difficult" (as in a hard question), but since the word is used as an adjective in both cases, it is an ...
Polysemy entails a common historic root to a word or phrase. Broad medical terms usually followed by qualifiers, such as those in relation to certain conditions or types of anatomical locations are polysemic, and older conceptual words are with few exceptions highly polysemic (and usually beyond shades of similar meaning into the realms of being ambiguous).
Monosemy as a methodology for analysis is based on the recognition that almost all cases of polysemy (where a word is understood to have multiple meanings) require context in order to differentiate these supposed meanings.
When an ambiguity instead results from two separate words which happen to be pronounced the same way, it is called homonymy. For instance, the English word "row" can denote the action of rowing or to an arrangement of objects. In practice, polysemy and homonymy can be difficult to distinguish. [4]
In the process of encoding, the sender (i.e. encoder) uses verbal (e.g. words, signs, images, video) and non-verbal (e.g. body language, hand gestures, face expressions) symbols for which he or she believes the receiver (that is, the decoder) will understand. The symbols can be words and numbers, images, face expressions, signals and/or actions.
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1] [2] enantionymy (enantio-means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.