Word.ws English Dictionary

polysemies

polysemies is the plural of polysemy.

Meaning of polysemy

Noun

polysemy (usually uncountable, plural polysemies)

  1. (usually) The quality characteristic of a polyseme, a sign (such as a word or symbol) that has multiple meanings (senses), often including multiple similar ones.
    • Fifty years ago the linguist and semanticist Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy, the fact that some words have a network of multiple but related meanings, is "the pivot of semantic analysis" […]2011, Brigitte Nerlich, Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language, page 3
    Antonyms:
    monosemy

Questions about polysemies

What is polysemies the plural of?
Polysemies is the plural of polysemy.

Words near polysemies in the dictionary

  1. polyseme
  2. polysemes
  3. polysemia
  4. polysemic
  5. polysemically
  6. polysemies
  7. polysemous
  8. polysemously
  9. polysemousness
  10. polysemy
  11. polysensitise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polysemies (page history and authors); polysemy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “polysemies.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/polysemies. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.