Word sense

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" [http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=play] , each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence. For example: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

*semantics - study of meaning
*lexical semantics - the study of what the words of a language denote and how it is that they do this
*sememe - unit of meaning
*linguistics - the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied.
*sense and reference

External links

* [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/kilgarriff97dont.html ”I don’t believe in word senses”] -- Adam Kilgarriff (1997)
* [http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ WordNet(R)] - A large lexical database of English words and their meanings maintained by the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory.


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