Word that means has more than one meaning

Learning English can be fun. It can be daunting. It can be empowering. It can also be confusing, on occasion. But one thing it definitely isn’t is boring. Even the most fluent English speakers are often surprised when they discover something new about the language: a grammar rule brought to their attention for the first time, a word that they’d never come across before or, even more surprisingly, a familiar word used in an unexpected way! Yes, it is quite common for one English word to have two (or more) completely different meanings.

The way to tell these same-spelling, different-meaning words apart is to pay attention to the context in which they are being used. This will make much more sense when we see these words in action, so let’s look at some examples.

Here is a word that has more than one meaning:

Mine

• as a noun: a place underground from where minerals are extracted
  Peter has been working at a coal mine since April.
• as a possessive pronoun: to show possession
  This is your bag, not mine.

Isn’t that interesting? The same word—mine—is used in both example sentences, but it means two entirely different things in each.

Here is a list of ten other English words with more than one meaning:

1. Interest

• as a noun: wanting to learn or know more about something
  She developed an interest in programming after taking a course in college and now she is a
  professional programmer.
• as a noun: additional money charged on a borrowed sum
  I am paying a high rate of interest on my home loan.
• as a verb: to arouse curiosity or attention
  We built interest in our product by outlining its many benefits on our social media channels.

2. Date

• as a noun: the day of the month or year
  We still haven’t set a date for the ceremony.
• as a verb: to show the age of something
  This food at this restaurant is delicious but the old-fashioned décor really dates it.

3. Engage

• as a verb: to be involved in some work or an activity
  The students hope to engage in a lively discussion with the visiting professor.
• as an adjective: to have formally agreed to marry someone
  The engaged couple shared the good news with their friends and family.

4. Leave

• as a verb: to go away from somewhere
  Ali leaves for Delhi soon.
• as a verb: to remain
  The ink will leave a stain on my shirt.
• as a verb: to deposit or deliver
  The delivery person leaves Sharmila’s parcels with her neighbor.
• as a noun: to be absent from work or duty
  Gunjan is at home on leave today. She will not be attending the meeting.

5. Novel

• as a noun: a prose, fictionalized narrative in the form of a book that often tells a complex
  story with characters and action
  My mother’s novel about three generations of women from a small town has won the National Book Award this year.
• as an adjective: something that is unique and interesting
  I discovered a novel way to spend less money and save more

6. Park

• as a noun: a public garden or area for recreation
  I am taking my children to play in the park today.
• as a verb: to bring a car or vehicle to a stop for a period of time
  We are leaving for the concert now so that we get a good spot to park the car.

7. Play

• as a verb: to engage in an activity or sport
  We are going to play football today.
  My band is playing at the City Club on Saturday. Why don’t you come check us out?
• as a verb: to act in a dramatic production
  I am playing the role of a politician in my next film.
• as a noun: a theatrical production
  Hamlet is my favorite play of all time.

8. Right

• as an adjective: morally fair, good or proper
  The right thing to do now would be to apologize for your mistake.
• as a noun: morally right or just.
  He doesn’t seem to understand the difference between right and wrong.
• as a noun: something one has legal or moral claim to
  As a citizen of this country I have voting rights.
• as a noun: the direction or location of something
  If you look to your right, you will see the Museum of Natural History.

9. Run

• as a verb: to move faster than while walking
  Don’t run down the street, that’s dangerous!
• as a verb: to go somewhere in urgency or distress (not literally “running”, necessarily)
  Even as an adult, I run to my mother with all my problems.
• as a verb: to contend in a race of some kind
  I intend to run for President four years from now.
• as a noun: a continuous spell of a something
  Souvik has a had a run of bad luck this year.

10. Type

• as a noun: a category of things or people that share something in common
  They sell all types of fabric in that store.
• as a verb: to write something on a keypad by pressing keys
  Wow! You type very fast!

Now that’s a lot of different meanings for only a few words, isn’t it? And if you’ll believe it – many of these words can be used in even more ways than the ones listed here. But don’t be overwhelmed, a good online or print dictionary will help you find all the meanings of any English word you might encounter. And the more you read and speak in English, the stronger your vocabulary will become.

Here’s another great idea – to really power up your vocabulary try a Burlington English course! We have expert teachers on hand to guide you with our spoken English training courses that will take your language learning journey to the next level.

Hyperbole as a
linguistic but not rhetoric device is an overstatement or exaggerated
statement not meant to be understood literally but expressing an
intensely emotional attitude of the speaker to what he is speaking
about. The emotional tone is due to the illogical character in which
the direct denotative and the contextual emotional meanings are
combined. For example, It’s a nightmare, Haven’t seen you
for ages, A thousand pardons.

The most important difference
between a poetic hyperbole and a linguistic one lies in the fact that
the former creates an image, whereas in the latter the denotative
meaning quickly fades out and the corresponding exaggerating words
serve only as general signs of emotion without specifying the emotion
itself. For example, such emphatic words as awfully!, lovely!

Litotes [
tt]
or understatement may be defined as expressing the
affirmative by the negative or its contrary. For example, not half
bad for good, no coward for brave. As a
rule, litotes creates no permanent change in the semantic structure
of the word concerned. The purpose of understatement is
not to deceive but to produce a stronger impression on the hearer.

Irony is the
expression of one’s meaning by words of opposite meaning,
especially a simulated adoption of the opposite point of view for the
purpose of ridicule. For example, You’ve got us into a nice
mess. Here the adjective nice means bad.

euphemism
is the substitution of words of mild connotations for rough or
unpleasant expressions. For example, queer for mad,
deceased for dead, perspiration for sweat.

From the semantic point of
view euphemism is important because meanings with unpleasant
connotations appear in words formerly neutral, as a result of their
repeated use instead of other words that are for some reasons
unmentionable.

euphemism
has nothing to do with taboo of primitive peoples as a
prohibition meant as a safeguard supernatural forces or taboo names
of ritual objects or animals when their names were regarded as the
equivalents of what was named. For example, the taboo name of the
bear (whose name originally meant ‘brown’; cf. Russian
медведь).

The term taboo
in modern linguistics, especially in lexicology, is used to denote a
vulgar connotation of the word which must not be used in a polite
conversation. For example, the so-called ‘four-letter’ words are
labeled vulgar.

Disphemism is
the substitution of words of rough or unpleasant connotations for
mild expressions. For example, to kick the bucket for to
die, psycho or gaga for mad.

Lecture 3. Polysemy

3.1. The notion of polysemy

The term polysemy
stems from the Greek word polýsēmos ‘having many
meanings’. It is defined as the ability of a word to have several
meanings simutenuously.

It is very important to
distinguish between the lexical meaning of a word in speech
and its semantic structure in language. The meaning in
speech is contextual. The definite context
particularizes the lexical meaning of a word and makes possible the
realization of only one meaning. Any word actually used in speech is
monosemantic but it may render a complicated notion.
Monosemantic words, that is words having only one meaning are few in
number; these are mainly scientific terms, such as molecule.

The monosemantic property of a
word used in context does not exclude the complexity of each
denotative meaning as it serves to signify complex notions with many
features. For example, the word table has at least 9 meanings
in Modern English: (1) a piece of furniture; (2) meals; (3) a thin
flat piece of stone, metal, wood; (4) an orderly arrangemet of facts,
figures etc.

If we turn to the meaning of
words as they exist in language we shall observe that frequently used
words are polysemantic. A word that has more than one
meaning in the language is called polysemantic. Its
meanings form its semantic structure.

The semantic structure
of a polysemantic word may be defined as a
structured set of interrelated meanings. It is an organized
set of recurrent variants and shades of meaning a given sound complex
can assume in different contexts, together with their emotional
colouring, stylistic peculiarities and other typical connotations.
The semantic structure of the word is a fact of language, not of
speech. It is developed and fixed in the course of the language’s
history.

Special procedures of
componential analysis have been developed to determine
the components of each meaning and represent this as a combination of
elementary senses or semes. A seme
is the smallest, elementary, ultimate constituent of the lexical
meaning of the word.

Polysemy exists only in
language but not in speech. Polysemy does not interfere with the
communicative function of the language because in every particular
case the situation and context cancel all the meanings but one and
make speech unambiguous.

Polysemy is inherent in the
very nature of words and notions, as they always contain a
generalization of several traits of the object. Some of these traits
are common with other objects, hence the possibility of identical
names for objects possessing common features. Thus polysemy is
characteristic of most words in many languages. But it is more
characteristic of the English vocabulary due to the monosyllabic
character of English and the predominance of root words.

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What are polysemous words? Is it easy to understand someone if they say ‘did you get the bat?’ Polysemy refers to a single word with more than one meaning. The multiple meanings are listed under one entry in a dictionary. An example of polysemy is the word dish. If we took a look at the dictionary we see that dish has multiple definitions, or polysemous meanings, under one entry:

• It’s your turn to wash the dishes = a kind of plate.
• How long does it take to cook this dish? = a meal.

Wing (noun)

The term polysemy, or polysemous words, comes from the Greek words poly and sēma which together mean ‘many signs’. The opposite of polysemy is monosemy. Monosemy is when one word has only one meaning.

Polysemy is related to homonymy (one word that has multiple meanings but is pronounced and/or spelt the same). Additionally, because polysemous words have more than one meaning, they can cause lexical ambiguity. This can happen when someone hears/reads something without the same frame of reference or contextual information as the speaker/writer. For example, ‘Let’s go to the bank!’ isn’t clear. Does this mean ‘a river bank’ or ‘a financial institution’?

1. He has served his time in prison.
2. The free food is served to homeless people only.
3. This old bike has served me well.
4. The new mall will serve the community well.
5. My mom served in the medical corps.

All five sentences use the same verb serve. Although each sentence carries a different sense of serve, they all imply the same meaning of ‘giving service’:

1. He has served his time in prison → spend some time (in prison).
2. The free food is served for homeless people only → provide.
3. This old bike has served me well → be useful.
4. The new mall will serve the community well → provide.
5. My mom serves in the medical corps → work as.

Serve is then a very good example of polysemous words. Some other examples of polysemy include:

• Verb: get — receive, bring, move/travel.
• Noun: bank — of a river/canal, a place to deposit money, a slope.
• Adjective: light — colours, not heavy, not serious.

Polysemy examples in literature

How can we analyse polysemic examples in literature? Take a look at this excerpt from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1623) (Act 5, Scene 3) below and analyze the polysemous meaning of the word gallery:

The word gallery has several different polysemous meanings:

1. A long corridor to exhibit works of art in Elizabethan and Jacobean houses.
2. (In a theatre) the highest of such projecting platforms, containing the cheapest seats.
3. A crypt or a catacomb.

• Refers to a word with multiple meanings.
• Are listed under a single dictionary entry.
• Must stem from the same word class, eg noun-noun: mouse (an animal — computer device), wings (parts of birds for flying — part of a building), beam (a line of light — a piece of wood).

Homonymic words

• Refers to words with different meanings but with the same pronunciation and/or spelling.
• Are listed under multiple dictionary entries.
• Can be verb-noun combination: to address — an address, to rock — a rock, to park — a park.

Polysemy vs. homonymy

What is the difference between polysemic words and homonymy? Take the word address.

First, analyse the multiple meanings and word class. Address has two meanings and two different word classes:

Second, if the words have multiple forms (multiple entries in a dictionary), eg a verb and noun, they are homonyms. If the two words stem from a single form (one entry in a dictionary), eg a verb or noun, they are polysemies. The word address has two word forms: a verb and a noun. This proves that address is a homonym.

To explain the difference between polysemous words and hyponymic expressions, let’s take the word mouse.

Polysemy describes one word with more than one meaning.

Because the word mouse has multiple meanings it can cause lexical ambiguity: «Do you mean the animal mouse or the computer device?» Hyponymy describes a super and subordinate relationship between words.

Through our examples of polysemy, we see that a house mouse and a field mouse aren’t the two different meanings of a mouse. Both types of the singular mouse refer to one thing, the animal.

From the perspective of hyponymy, the mouse that is the computer device isn’t a kind of the animal mouse. It is a mouse (the connotative meaning of mouse = polysemy).

Bring me the mouse!

¹ A. Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture, (2016).