hyponymhypernym

Hyponym and hypernym describe a semantic relationship between lexical items. Hyponymy is a relation in which the sense of one term (the hyponym) is included within the sense of another term (the hypernym). The hypernym denotes a broad category, while the hyponym denotes a more specific member or subtype. The relationship is asymmetric and transitive: if A is a hyponym of B, and B is a hyponym of C, then A is also a hyponym of C.

Examples illustrate the relation: dog is a hyponym of animal; poodle is a hyponym of dog; sedan is a hyponym of car. Conversely, animal is a hypernym of dog and sedan. Words that share the same hypernym are co-hyponyms (dog and cat are both hyponyms of animal). Some terms can be hyponyms of more than one hypernym depending on sense; for instance, bat can be a mammal (hyponym of animal) or a sports implement (hyponym of equipment), reflecting polysemy.

Hyponymy is a foundational concept in lexicography, taxonomy, and knowledge representation. It is widely used in natural language processing for building hierarchies, performing semantic search, and enabling ontology design. In resources like WordNet, hyponymy relations connect synsets to form a hierarchical structure that supports reasoning about word meanings and their relationships.