homonymy

Homonymy is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more lexical items share the same form but have distinct meanings. The form can be identical in pronunciation, spelling, or both. Homonymy often results from independent historical developments of words or from shifts in meaning that leave the form unchanged.

Subtypes are commonly described as homophones and homographs. Homophones are words that share the same pronunciation but differ in spelling and meaning, such as knight and night or sail and sale. Homographs are words that have the same spelling and may have different pronunciations and meanings, such as lead (to guide) and lead (the metal). When a pair is identical in both spelling and pronunciation and carries different meanings, many sources call them true homonyms; some grammars treat this as a special case of both homography and homophony, or simply as distinct forms that are identical in form but unrelated in sense.

Polysemy is related but distinct: it describes a single word form with multiple related senses that originate from a common source, such as mouth of a person and mouth of a bottle. In homonymy, the separate senses are typically not closely related etymologically or semantically.

Disambiguation relies on context, grammar, and sometimes morphology. In dictionaries, word sense disambiguation is reflected in separate definitions or numbered senses. In language processing, recognizing homonyms is essential for correctly interpreting meaning in text and speech.