Polisèmic

Polisèmic is a term used to describe signs, most often words, that carry multiple related meanings. In English, the standard term is polysemic (or polysemous), while polisèmic appears as a less common variant or in cross-linguistic usage (for example, in French or Spanish cognates such as polisémique or polisémico). The concept refers to polysemy, the idea that a single form can be extended with several senses that are etymologically or conceptually connected.

In linguistic analysis, polysemy distinguishes from homonymy. Polysemous words have related meanings that share a core sense, whereas homonyms have unrelated meanings that happen to coincide in form. Examples often cited include bank (a financial institution and a riverbank) or light (not heavy vs illumination), where the senses are linked through a shared underlying concept in many analyses. The boundaries between senses can be fluid and context-dependent, leading to debates about sense inventories and the number of distinct meanings a word should be assigned.

The term polisèmic, when used, typically functions as a synonym or variant of polysemic. It is more common to encounter polysemy discussions in linguistics, lexicography, and natural language processing, where understanding polysemic words is important for tasks such as word-sense disambiguation and semantic representation. In multilingual contexts, the concept remains central to studies of how languages encode related meanings within a single lexical item.