Polysemy is a linguistic term for words or symbols with multiple related meanings. The opposite is heterosemy, where a word has only one meaning. English has many polysemous words, such as “set” with around 120 meanings. Polysemous words can evolve over time, and puns and metonymy are forms of polysemy. Homonyms are similar but have different origins for their meanings.
A polysemy is a word or symbol that has more than one meaning. To be considered a polysemy, a word must have separate meanings that may be different, but related to each other. Meanings and words must have the same spelling and pronunciation and must have the same origin.
The term polysemy is used in linguistics as a means of categorizing and studying various aspects of languages. Like many words used to classify languages, polysemy is a mixture of Latin and Greek and literally means “many meanings.” The opposite of a polysemy is a heterosemy, which means that the word has only one meaning.
Perhaps the English word with the most meanings is “set”. Dictionaries give ‘set’ about 120 meanings. English is full of polysemous words with two, three, or more meanings, including “wood,” which means both part of a tree and a group of trees.
To be considered a polysemy, the word must keep the same sound and spelling, but with distinct meanings. The difference between a polysemy and a homonym is difficult to determine. Even homonyms have the same spelling and pronunciation with different meanings. While the differences between homonyms and polysemes are subjective at best, however, it appears that homonyms are words in which the meanings have separate origins from each other.
The presumption with polysemes is that the different meanings all arise from the same base word. This means that their meanings have fragmented or evolved over time. Quite often, this occurs through the process of words changing form, such as nouns becoming verbs and vice versa. Slang and popular culture trends can also add meaning to words. For example, the word “gay” meant “happy” until the 20th century, when it also became “homosexual.”
Other words have been polysemous, but now the number of meanings has been reduced by dividing the words. An example of this is the difference between flour and flower. Flour was a polysemous word meaning both the grain used for bread and the flowers of plants. The word ‘flower’ was created to keep the same sound, but to distinguish the two meanings. In a twist, “flour” largely has a meaning, but “flower” has also taken on the meanings associated with the word “flower” to become a polysemy.
Polysemous words play an important role in comedy in the form of puns. A pun is a pun in which a phrase, caption, title, or joke plays on the fact that a word has more than one meaning. Puns can also play on the fact that a number of English words like “heir” and “hair” or “reign” and “rain” sound the same, but have different meanings. Polysemous puns play on the fact that the same handwriting can produce different meanings.
Metonymy is also a form of polysemy. Metonymy occurs when a thing, place or group is known not by its official name, but by a single part. For example, if a car is called “wheels”, it adds a new meaning to the world “wheel”. This form of polysemy is usually not official, but is instead more of a slang formation. The practice of referring to governments by the name of the country’s capital, for example, is a type of media shorthand.
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