Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act of denoting; indication.
  • noun Something, such as a sign or symbol, that denotes.
  • noun Something signified or referred to; a particular meaning of a symbol.
  • noun The most specific or direct meaning of a word, in contrast to its figurative or associated meanings.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of denoting or indicating by a name or other sign; the attaching of a designation to an object; that function of a name or other designation by which it calls up to the mind addressed the idea of an object for which it may stand.
  • noun That which a word denotes, names, or marks, in distinction from that which it means or signifies. See connotation.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The marking off or separation of anything.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act of denoting, or something (such as a symbol) that denotes
  • noun logic, linguistics, semiotics The primary, literal, or explicit meaning of a word, phrase, or symbol; that which a word denotes, as contrasted with its connotation; the aggregate or set of objects of which a word may be predicated.
  • noun philosophy, logic The intension and extension of a word
  • noun semantics Something signified or referred to; a particular meaning of a symbol
  • noun semiotics The surface or literal meaning encoded to a signifier, and the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary
  • noun computer science Any mathematical object which describes the meanings of expressions from the languages, formalized in the theory of denotational semantics
  • noun media-studies A first level of analysis: what the audience can visually see on a page. Denotation often refers to something literal, and avoids being a metaphor.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the act of indicating or pointing out by name
  • noun the most direct or specific meaning of a word or expression; the class of objects that an expression refers to

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From to denote (from Middle French denoter, from Latin denotare "denote, mark out", itself from de- "completely" + notare "to mark") + -ation

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Examples

  • To say that name has no denotation is like saying, in 1970, that “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” has no denotation because the entities in question are not genuinely soviet, are not genuinely socialist and are not genuinely republics.

    Matthew Yglesias » After GWOT, What? 2007

  • Where’s your evidence? there’s a great percentage of impoverished suburbs in France than in the US, but the denotation is the same.

    Matthew Yglesias » More on Charles Murray 2010

  • Designation or denotation, which is the relation of a proposition to an external state of affairs (theory of reference, with its criterion of truth or falsity).

    Gilles Deleuze Smith, Daniel 2008

  • Like Mill, he distinguishes between a term's denotation, which is the object or objects it stands for, and its connotation, which is the property or properties it ascribes to something.

    Stanisław Leśniewski Simons, Peter 2007

  • Each word has its denotation, that is to say, it names something.

    unknown title 2009

  • A word which carries on its face that it belongs to a nomenclature, seems at first sight to differ from other concrete general names in this — that its meaning does not reside in its connotation, in the attributes implied in it, but in its denotation, that is, in the particular group of things which it is appointed to designate; and can not, therefore, be unfolded by means of a definition, but must be made known in another way.

    A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive John Stuart Mill 1839

  • This “content” is denotation which is a crude gloss on the full meaning of an articulation, a coarse hacking away of import.

    Notes on Notes Hal Duncan 2009

  • This “content” is denotation which is a crude gloss on the full meaning of an articulation, a coarse hacking away of import.

    Archive 2009-07-01 Hal Duncan 2009

  • Obviously the basic connotation of the words is somewhat different because there’s a great percentage of impoverished suburbs in France than in the US, but the denotation is the same.

    Matthew Yglesias » More on Charles Murray 2010

  • Under the circumstances, it does seem to me that White's directive on the use of "denotation" and "connotation" is both peremptory and pre-emptive.

    Letting Go White, Morton 1967

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