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WORD SENSE

A word sense is one of the meanings of a word.

For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word play1, each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence. For example:

We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater.
The children went out to play in the park.

In each sentence we associate a different meaning of the word play based hints the rest of the sentence gives us.

Computers that read words one a time and must use a process called word sense disambiguation to find the correct meaning of a word.

See also

semantics

linguistics