omonimie

Omonimie, or homonymy in English, is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more lexical items share the same form but have different meanings. The shared form may be identical in spelling, pronunciation, or both. Omonimie arises in several ways, including convergent evolution of independent words, borrowing from different languages, or semantic drift that separates originally related senses.

In linguistic analysis, the terms homographs and homophones describe two related aspects of omonimie: homographs are words that are spelled the same but may be pronounced differently or have different meanings, while homophones are words that are pronounced the same but may be spelled differently. When a single form carries totally unrelated meanings from different origins, it is often labeled as true homonymy. If the senses are related or have developed from a common source, the phenomenon is more accurately described as polysemy rather than omonimie.

Examples commonly cited in discussions of omonimie include words like “bank,” which can mean a financial institution or the side of a river, and “bat,” which can refer to the flying mammal or a sports implement. In other languages, similar phenomena occur with different strings of sounds or spellings that nonetheless correspond to distinct meanings.

Omonimie has practical implications for lexicography, natural language processing, and language learning. In dictionaries, disambiguation guides readers to the intended sense; in computational systems, algorithms must determine the correct sense from context. Understanding omonimie clarifies how speakers and readers navigate ambiguous linguistic forms.