HOMONYM

Homonym

In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that share spelling and pronunciation but may have different meanings. Thus homonyms are simultaneously homographs and homophones . The state of being a homonym is called homonymy. Examples of homonyms are the pair stalk and stalk and the pair left and left . A distinction is sometimes made between "true" homonyms, which are unrelated in origin, such as skate and skate, and polysemous homonyms, or polysemes, which have a shared origin, such as mouth and mouth .

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homonym

Noun

  1. A word that both sounds and is spelled the same as another word but has a different meaning.
  2. A word that sounds or is spelled the same as another word but has a different meaning, technically called a (same sound) or a (same spelling).
  3. A name for a taxon that is identical in spelling to another name that belongs to a different taxon.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: homonym
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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