Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Having or characterized by many meanings: highly polysemous words such as play and table.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Having many meanings.
Wiktionary
- adj. linguistics Having multiple meanings or interpretations.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. of words; having many meanings
Etymologies
- From Latin polysēmus, from Ancient Greek πολύσημος (polusēmos), from πολύς (polus, "many") + σημαίνω (sēmainō, "I signify, mean"). (Wiktionary)
- From Late Latin polysēmus, from Greek polusēmos : polu-, poly- + sēma, sign. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Words or phrases that can have two or more are sometimes referred to as polysemous words.”
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“On its own, of course, a word may be horribly polysemous and ambiguous.”
“BD has always dwelt in a polysemous universe, which has left his texts open to unusual misinterpretation and abuse.”
“The reward for the reader is polysemous meaning, subtlety, fractal flavor bursts of emotion and idea.”
BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG » Writers on Writing: Sentence Structure Oopsies
“It was a pregnant, polysemous term, intended to inspire.”
The Huffington Post: Philip Reynolds: The Biblical Definitions Of The Pursuit Of Happiness
“Barthes famously said that images are polysemous, they have multiple meanings.”
“Kinda redundant to describe any piece of art as polysemous, because it all…”
“We should note that equivocal terms include homonyms (two words with the same form but different senses, e.g., ˜pen™), polysemous words (one word with two or more senses), and, for medieval thinkers, proper names shared by different people.”
“(I use this polysemous label to refer, here, to the idea that certain judgments have an internal or necessary connection to motivation and to action.)”
“The polysemous paragon, or How the turkey got its name”
Rambles at starchamber.com » Blog Archive » The polysemous paragon, or How the turkey got its name
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘polysemous’.
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INTERP - terminology management terms
Terms from the fields of terminology, lexicography, lexicology and corpus linguistics
reworder, rewording, parser, parsing, tagger, tagging, aligner, aligning, content analysis, content analyzer, corpus management, glossary and 546 more...
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adj. + adv.
vainglorious, lanuginous, altiloquent, ambisextrous, desiderative, flothery, liquescent, logoed, autotelic, tropology, erotogenic, crocky and 108 more...
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ecbrenner's list
flatline, luddism, apocalipstick, muttsucker, leviathan of fore..., flint, coryphaeus, donnybrook, bandwidth, bagpipe the mizen, cheesed off, asterism and 525 more...
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jaradgiese's Words
paronomasia, ostensible, insouciant, sobriquet, burlesque, insalubrious, apotheosis, hyperbole, connubial, felicity, florid, conurbation and 642 more...
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my words
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
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fbharjo's Words
jumelle, kef, kenspeckle, lautitious, essentic, pilpulistic, impavid, cicurant, clou, chrysostomic, miasma, teleology and 1625 more...
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Adjectival Arcana
A roster of adjectives that infrequently surface in typical conversation and writing. Many are dredged from scientific or other technical jargon or sieved from examples of disused archaic forms.
unitegmic, acaulescent, reticuloendothelial, ingressive, uniate, acanthopterygian, ossific, epiphysial, perivisceral, acœlomatous, cestoid, acælomate and 7756 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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jmjarmstrong's list
Words that I used to know.
geloscopy, hunker, willy nilly, harum scarum, whacko, meh, nork, misunderestimate, atrabiliousness, luftmensch, auxanometer, hyperhedonia and 1948 more...
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Alejandro's list
krukolibidinous, screed, energumen, frotteurism, anaphroditus, doppelgänger, polysemous, estrapade, polysemous, kerfuffle, pseudandry, daemon
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Prep015
churlish, aplomb, semblance, dissembler, dissimilitude, aphorism, stopgap, maverick, prognostication, traduce, nugatory, eminent and 53 more...
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academia
unfamiliar words encountered in academic articles
mereological, sophist, invidious, euphonic, epicycle, tendentious, inchoate, apposite, rapprochement, nomology, chronotope, monism and 28 more...
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just cool words
liberticide, polysemous, scofflaw, iconoclast, aestheticize, laconism, Fourierism, a corps perdu, apotropaic, dichotomy, Epicene, languor and 13 more...
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Words about Words, Language, Writing
dis legomenon, hapax legomenon, tris legomenon, tetrakis legomenon, longueur, mot juste, incunabula, incunabulum, portmanteau, mawkish, mawkishness, rhotic and 47 more...
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strangeknight's Words
callipygous, callipygian, minatory, gallimaufry, suppurate, consanguinity, coarctation, concinnity, apical, inimical, manichaean, intrigant and 68 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for polysemous.
jmjarmstrong JM is polysemous at the moment. Apr 4, 2011