monosemy

Monosemy is a term in lexical semantics describing a word or expression that has a single, stable core meaning across its uses. In ordinary language, many words are polysemous, possessing multiple related senses; monosemous terms are comparatively rare and are most often found in technical or highly standardized vocabularies where the denotation is tightly defined.

In practice, researchers distinguish between a word’s core sense and any derived or extended senses. A truly monosemous item would lack widely used secondary interpretations beyond its primary denotation. Nevertheless, many terms labeled as monosemous may still acquire restricted, domain-specific interpretations or metaphorical extensions, though these are less common in everyday use.

The concept has several practical implications. For lexicography and language teaching, monosemous terms can simplify sense inventories and reduce ambiguity. In computational linguistics, they can ease word sense disambiguation, but absolute monosemy is rare in natural language; corpus data often reveal polysemy even within restricted domains.

Debate surrounds the notion of true monosemy. Some linguists contend that no natural language item is truly monosemous, while others maintain that a clearly defined core sense in technical terms warrants the label. As a result, monosemy is best viewed as a spectrum between monosemy and polysemy, shaped by domain, context, and usage.