polisemia

Polisemia, or polysemy in English, is a linguistic phenomenon in which a single word form encodes several related meanings. The related senses are usually connected through a core idea, and newer senses often arise by extension from an existing meaning. Polisemia is a common feature of natural languages and affects how words are interpreted in context, dictionaries, and language processing.

The distinction between polisemia and homonimia (homonymy) rests on semantic relatedness. In polysemy, senses are interrelated and come from the same lexical source, typically through metaphor, metonymy, generalization, or specialization. In homonymy, different senses originate from distinct etymological roots and bear no essential semantic link. For example, polysemous words include set (to put in place; a group of things; a fixed arrangement; to harden) and run (to move quickly on foot; to operate; a sequence or series; a tear or stretch in fabric). In contrast, true homonyms like bank (financial institution versus river edge) are generally considered unrelated in meaning and history.

Senses in polisemia are often organized in networks within the mental lexicon, with semantic relations such as hypernymy, metaphorical extension, and metonymy linking them. This organization influences language use, sense disambiguation, and learning. In computational linguistics, polisemia poses challenges for word sense disambiguation, machine translation, and information retrieval, where context determines the intended sense of a word.

In sum, polisemia describes how one word form can carry multiple, related meanings, reflecting dynamic semantic extension rather than independent, unrelated terms.