Word sense

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 meaning.

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.

Relations between senses

In language, words often have related senses within a semantic field, with one sense being broader and another narrower. This pattern is common in technical jargon, where a word may have a narrower sense for a specialized audience compared to a general audience. For example, in linguistics, "orthography" will often be glossed for spelling, casing, spacing, hyphenation, and punctuation, making it a hypernym of "spelling". This pattern is not limited to jargon and can be found in general vocabulary as well. Natural language relies on context for implicit meaning, unlike programming languages that prioritize explicitness about hyponymy and hypernymy, way more than programming languages do, meaning is implicit within a context. Examples include variations in the senses of "wood wool" and "bean" and the following:

• The word "diabetes" without further specification usually refers to diabetes mellitus.
• The word "tinnitus" without further specification usually refers to subjective tinnitus.
• The word "angina" without further specification usually refers to angina pectoris.
• The word "tuberculosis" without further specification usually refers to pulmonary tuberculosis.
• The word "emphysema" without further specification usually refers to pulmonary emphysema.
• The word "cervix" without further specification usually refers to the uterine cervix.

Usage labels of "sensu" plus a qualifier, such as "sensu stricto" ("in the strict sense") or "sensu lato" ("in the broad sense"), are used to specify the intended meaning in a text.