Hipernim

Hipernim is a linguistic term that designates a word whose reference set includes the referents of other words. It is a superordinate term in a semantic hierarchy. If Y is a hyponym of X, then X is a hypernym of Y. The hypernymy relation is transitive: a hypernym of a hypernym is a hypernym of all hyponyms beneath it. A word may have multiple hypernyms when its senses belong to different semantic domains.

Hypernymy is contrasted with meronymy (part-whole) and with hyponymy (the inverse relation). The same word can have different hypernyms across its senses. For example, the word dog is a hyponym of animal and of pet in appropriate senses, while vehicle is a hypernym of car and bicycle. Some words function as general hypernyms for broad domains (for instance, animal or object).

In lexicography and natural language processing, hypernyms are used to build taxonomies, dictionaries, and lexical graphs such as WordNet. They facilitate generalization in information retrieval, semantic search, and reasoning over word meanings. Hypernym detection can be done manually by lexicographers or automatically through corpus analysis, pattern-based extraction, and distributional semantics, often requiring sense disambiguation to avoid conflating different meanings.

Examples: animal is a hypernym of dog and cat; vehicle is a hypernym of car and bicycle; plant is a hypernym of rose and oak. Conversely, dog and cat are hyponyms of animal, while car and bicycle are hyponyms of vehicle.