In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word.
For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word play, 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 on hints the rest of the sentence gives us.
Computers or people that read words one at a time must use a process called word sense disambiguation to find the correct meaning of a word.
Read more about Word Sense: Related Terms
Famous quotes containing the words word and/or sense:
“Hearing your words, and not a word among them
Tuned to my liking, on a salty day
When inland woods were pushed by winds, that flung them
Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love affair.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)