polysemy

helo guys for this time i will tell you about polysemy


Polysemy is the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. A polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. Adjective: polysemous or polysemic.
In contrast, a one-to-one match between a word and a meaning is called monosemy. According to William Croft, "Monosemy is probably most clearly found in specialized vocabulary dealing with technical topics" (The Handbook of Linguistics, 2003).
According to some estimates, more than 40% of English words have more than one meaning. The fact that so many words (or lexemes) are polysemous "shows that semantic changes often add meanings to the language without subtracting any" (M. Lynne Murphy, Lexical Meaning, 2010).