polysemy

From polyseme + -y.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈpɒ.lɪ.siː.mi/, /pəˈlɪ.sɪ.mi/

• Audio (Southern England):

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• Audio (Southern England):

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polysemy (usually uncountable, plural polysemies)

1. (semantics) The quality characteristic of a polyseme, a sign (such as a word or symbol) that has multiple meanings (senses), often including multiple similar ones.

   Antonym: monosemy

   Hypernym: colexification

   Hyponyms: (linear types) autohyponymy, autohypernymy, autosuperordination, automeronymy, autoholonymy

   Coordinate terms: homonymy; homosemy

   • 2011, Brigitte Nerlich, Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language, page 3:

     Fifty years ago the linguist and semanticist Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy, the fact that some words have a network of multiple but related meanings, is "the pivot of semantic analysis" […]

   • 2017 July 27, Agustín Vicente and Ingrid L. Falkum, “Polysemy”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics‎^[1], Oxford University Press:

     Polysemy proliferates in natural language: Virtually every word is polysemous to some extent.

• ambiguity, lexical ambiguity (result of polysemy)
• polysemic (adjective)
• polysemous (adjective)
• polysemously (adverb)

• homonymy

• “polysemy”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.