hyponyms

Hyponymy is a semantic relation between words in which the meaning of one word is included within the meaning of another. The more specific term is called the hyponym, and the broader term is the hypernym. For example, “poodle” and “beagle” are hyponyms of “dog,” and “dog” is a hyponym of “animal.” The term hyponym comes from Greek hypo- “under” and onoma “name”; hypernym uses hyper- “over.”

This relation forms a hierarchy: hyponyms are narrower categories under a broader hypernym. The relation is transitive; if A is a hyponym of B and B is a hyponym of C, then A is a hyponym of C. In linguistic resources and computational linguistics, hyponymy is represented as edges in a tree or DAG, since a term may have multiple hypernyms and multiple hyponyms.

Hyponymy is sense-specific; polysemy can cause a term to have different hyponymy relations in different senses. Context determines which sense applies. For example, bank (financial institution) has a different set of hypernyms than bank (river bank).

Applications and related notions: Hyponymy is used in linguistic analysis, information retrieval, and natural language processing, and underpins lexical databases such as WordNet. Related notions include hypernym, meronym (part–whole), synonym, and polysemy.