Word sense

In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, the word "play" may have over 50 senses in a dictionary, each with a distinct meaning depending on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows:

We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater.

The coach devised a great play that put the visiting team on the defensive.

The children went out to play in the park.

In each sentence, different collocates of "play" indicates its different meanings.

Word-sense disambiguation is a process used by people and computers to determine the intended meaning of a word. It relies on context, such as adjacent words, phrases, purpose, the known or probable purpose, and register of the conversation, or document, and orientation, to narrow down the possible senses to the most likely one. This process is context-sensitive.

Advanced semantic analysis has led to a distinction between word senses that correspond to either a seme (the smallest unit of meaning) or a sememe (larger unit of meaning). Polysemy refers to the property of a word or phrase having multiple semes or sememes, resulting in multiple senses.