polisemy

Polisemy is not a widely recognized term in linguistics. In many sources it is encountered as a misspelling or alternate form of polysemy, the phenomenon where a single lexical item has multiple related meanings.

In standard terminology, polysemy refers to related senses that share a common core. This contrasts with homonymy, where the different senses are historically unrelated and typically not semantically connected. Polysemous relations often arise through metaphorical extension, metonymy, or domain shifts.

Common examples include bank (a financial institution and a riverbank) and mouth (an opening in the face and the opening of a river or cave). Some linguists debate exact classification for certain pairs, because meanings may sometimes be considered distinct lemmas rather than one polyseme.

The study of polysemy touches lexicography, semantics, cognitive linguistics, and computational linguistics. In natural language processing, distinguishing senses is essential for word sense disambiguation and for building semantic resources like dictionaries and conceptual networks.

Etymology: polysemy derives from Greek poly 'many' and sema 'sign'. Polisemy, if used, would be an erroneous variant; readers should refer to polysemy for the established concept.