Inlinguistics, aword sense is one of the meanings of aword. For example, adictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on thecontext of the word'susage in asentence, as follows:
We went to see theplayRomeo and Juliet at the theater.
The coach devised a greatplay that put the visiting team on the defensive.
The children went out toplay in the park.
In each sentencedifferent collocates of "play" signal its different meanings.
People andcomputers, as they read words, must use a process calledword-sense disambiguation[1][2] to reconstruct the likely intended meaning of a word. This process usescontext to narrow the possible senses down to the probable ones. The context includes such things as the ideas conveyed by adjacent words and nearby phrases, the known or probable purpose andregister of the conversation or document, and the orientation (time and place) implied or expressed. The disambiguation is thuscontext-sensitive.
Advancedsemantic analysis has resulted in a sub-distinction. A word sense corresponds either neatly to aseme (the smallest possible unit ofmeaning) or asememe (larger unit of meaning), andpolysemy of a word of phrase is the property of having multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses.
Often the senses of a word are related to each other within asemantic field. A common pattern is that one sense is broader and another narrower. This is often the case in technicaljargon, where thetarget audience uses a narrower sense of a word that ageneral audience would tend to take in its broader sense. For example, in casual use "orthography" will often beglossed for a lay audience as "spelling", but in linguisticusage "orthography" (comprising spelling,casing,spacing,hyphenation, and otherpunctuation) is ahypernym of "spelling". Besides jargon, however, the pattern is common even in general vocabulary. Examples are thevariation in senses of the term "wood wool" andin those of the word "bean". This pattern entails thatnatural language can often lackexplicitness abouthyponymy and hypernymy. Much more thanprogramming languages do, it relies on context instead of explicitness; meaning isimplicit within a context. Common examples are as follows:
Usage labels of "sensu" plus aqualifier, such as "sensu stricto" ("in the strict sense") or "sensu lato" ("in the broad sense") are sometimes used to clarify what is meant by a text.
Polysemy entails a common historic root to a word or phrase. Broad medical terms usually followed byqualifiers, 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 beingambiguous).
Homonymy is where two separate-root words (lexemes) happen to have the samespelling andpronunciation.
