Hyponymia

Hyponymia is a term occasionally used to refer to the semantic relation known as hyponymy—the relationship between a more general term and a more specific term. The preferred term in most linguistic literature is hyponymy; hyponymia is seen in some older or less formal writings and may denote the same concept or the study of this relation. Hyponymy is formed from Greek hypo- "under" and onoma "name," indicating that the hyponym name falls under the umbrella of the hypernym.

A hyponym X of a hypernym Y is such that the referents of X are a subset of the referents of Y; every X is a Y, but not every Y is an X. For example, "dog" is a hyponym of "animal"; "poodle" is a hyponym of "dog" (and thus also of "animal"). The reverse relation is hypernym; related terms are co-hyponyms, such as "dog" and "cat" under the hypernym "animal."

Hyponymy is a hierarchical, transitive relation used in lexical semantics and taxonomy. It is represented explicitly in lexical databases such as WordNet, where word senses are linked by hyponymy and hypernymy edges. Hyponymy has applications in natural language processing, including word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, and text classification.

See also:

- hypernym

- hyponymy

- co-hyponym

- WordNet

- taxonomy

- lexical semantics