Polysemy (/ pəˈlɪsɪmi / or / ˈpɒlɪˌsiːmi /; [1][2] from Ancient Greek πολύ- (polý-) 'many' and σῆμα (sêma) 'sign') is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. [3] .

Polysemy are words that have more than one related meaning. Depending on the context and situation, the English word can be used with different meanings. Here are some polysemy examples: I can see the mountains from my window. I see what you mean. I will see you tomorrow. Let me see your homework. I have seen many changes in my life.

Polysemy occurs when a word form carries more than one meaning. English has a very large stock of word forms, so its lexicon is relatively free of polysemy compared with many …

Sep 9, 2019 · Polysemy is the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings, and a polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. The word "polysemy" comes from the Greek for "many signs." The adjective forms of the word include polysemous or polysemic. In contrast, a one-to-one match between a word and a meaning is called "monosemy."

Polysemy is characterized as the phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses. It is distinguished from monosemy, where one word form is associated with a single meaning, and homonymy, where a single word form is associated with two or several unrelated meanings.

When a symbol, word, or phrase means many different things, that's called polysemy. The verb "get" is a good example of polysemy — it can mean "procure," "become," or "understand." One of the concepts used by linguists (people who study the way languages work) is polysemy — it's an ambiguous quality that many words and phrases in English share.

Jul 7, 2016 · Polysemy and Homonymy are two similar concepts in linguistics. Both of them refer to words having multiple meanings. Polysemy refers to the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase. Homonymy refers to the existence of two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings and origins.

Mar 1, 2024 · Polysemy is the type of lexical ambiguity where a word has multiple distinct but related interpretations.

Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information.

Polysemy comes from Neo-Latin polysemia, which comes from Greek polusemous [poly- (many) + sema (sign)] giving us a linguistic term, "having many meanings" or multiple meanings. We also have polyseme (singular) [puh LIS uh mee], and polysemes (plural) [puh LIS uh meez].