Homonyme

Homonyme is the term used in French linguistics to describe a word form that has two or more distinct meanings. In English, the corresponding term is homonym. The concept covers cases where a single word form corresponds to separate lexical items with no necessary semantic relation, though the exact usage varies by language and tradition.

Two closely related notions stem from the same idea: homophones and homographs. Homophones are words that sound alike but may be spelled differently, such as night and knight. Homographs are words that are spelled the same but may have different pronunciations and meanings, such as lead (to guide) and lead (the metal). When a word shares both spelling and pronunciation but carries different meanings, it is often described as a true homonym.

A common distinction is between homonymy and polysemy. Polysemes are related senses of a single word (for example, mouth of a person and mouth of a river), whereas homonyms have unrelated meanings that happen to share form. In practice, many linguists use “homonym” more broadly to include both homophony and homography, while others reserve it for fully unrelated senses.

In linguistics and lexicography, recognizing homonymy aids in disambiguation, language teaching, translation, and natural language processing. It also underpins wordplay and puns, where identical forms are exploited to evoke multiple meanings. The exact terminology may vary by language, but the core idea remains: words that look or sound the same can nonetheless mean different things.