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:
“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”
—E.E. (Edward Estlin)
“Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, and what circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)