monosemic

Monosemic is a term used in linguistics and semantics to describe a word or expression that has only one meaning. This is in contrast to polysemic words, which have multiple meanings. Monosemic words are often considered to be more precise and less ambiguous than polysemic words, as they do not require additional context to be understood. For example, the word "bank" can refer to a financial institution or the side of a river, making it polysemic. In contrast, the word "unicorn" is monosemic, as it only refers to a mythical creature with a single horn. The concept of monosemy is important in various fields, including natural language processing, machine translation, and lexicography, where it helps in disambiguating word meanings and improving the accuracy of language models.