hyperonyme

Hyperonyme, or hypernym in English, is a term in linguistics that designates a word with a broad meaning under which a set of more specific terms fall. In a semantic hierarchy, a hyperonyme is the counterpart of a hyponym: if X is a hyponym of Y, then Y is a hyperonyme of X. Example: "animal" is a hyperonyme of "dog," "cat," and "whale"; "dog" is a hyponym of "animal." A single hyperonyme may have many hyponyms, and a hyponym may have multiple hyperonyms, depending on the taxonomy or domain.

The term is used across languages; in English the preferred term is "hypernym" or "superordinate term." The word is derived from Greek roots meaning "above" and "name." In lexical resources and linguistic research, hyperonymy is a core relation used to organize vocabulary, from dictionaries to taxonomies.

In computational linguistics and information science, hypernymy is central to semantic networks, ontologies, and WordNets. Systems may automatically detect hypernyms from corpora or construct hierarchies for knowledge organization. Hypernym extraction supports tasks such as query expansion, word sense disambiguation, and taxonomy induction.

Related concepts include hyponym, taxonomy, ontology, and semantic networks; the study of hypernymy contributes to both theoretical linguistics and practical natural language processing.