hypernym

Hypernym is a linguistic term describing a word with a broad meaning that encompasses the meanings of more specific words, its hyponyms. In a hypernym–hyponym relationship, the hypernym is the general term and the hyponyms are the more specific instances. For example, animal is a hypernym of dog and cat; furniture is a hypernym of table and chair; vehicle is a hypernym of car and bicycle. The relation is hierarchical and transitive: if A is a hypernym of B and B is a hypernym of C, then A is a hypernym of C. A word can have multiple hypernyms at different levels of generality; for instance, dog is a hyponym of both mammal and animal.

Hypernymy is a core concept in lexicography and semantics, useful for organizing vocabularies, performing generalization, and enabling inference in language tasks. It contrasts with hyponymy, where the term is more specific. In practical terms, identifying hypernyms allows systems to move from specific terms to broader categories or to perform search expansion by including related general terms. In natural language processing and ontology design, hypernym relations are used to construct hierarchies that support tasks such as word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, and knowledge representation.

Etymology: the term hypernym comes from Greek hyper- meaning over or beyond, and -nym meaning name. Related terms include superordinate and subordinate, which describe general–specific relationships within a taxonomy. Hypernymy thus provides a formal way to express broad category relationships across languages and domains.