What is the difference between polysemous and homonymous words?

Sometimes, the richness of Spanish creates problems in using the language. In this language one word can they have different meanings and depend on the context for its correct understanding. There are others as well They are written similarly, but they have different meanings.

In this way, a bank can be a place to sit, a financial entity, or a group of fish. take care, priest or a form of the verb cura. And come wine, an alcoholic drink or a conjugation of the verb.

Without a doubt, the similarity between the two concepts is quite significant and can cause confusion. Therefore, it is advisable to take a look at dictionaries and definitions to learn more about these types of words. Here are some clues to recognize it Homonymous and polysemous wordswhich, at first glance, could turn out to be the same thing.

What is the difference between polysemous and homonymous words?

THE Royal Spanish Academy provides the following definition of homonym, “said of a word, which is pronounced like another, but has a different origin or meaning”. Regarding polysemy, he explains: “Plurality of meanings of a word or any linguistic sign”.

Homonymy it is the phenomenon that consists in the fact that two words with different etymologies come to have “the same name“, the same signifier, the same form, but because they are different words they also have different meanings.

Therefore there is the same form for wine, drink and wine, with a similar meaning to arrived. In some dictionaries They usually appear in different entries, as if they were unrelated words.

In any case, in Spanish, this whim It is less widespread than English or French, where the evolution of the language has led to a large list of homonymous words, often used to create puns.

Inside the namesake We can distinguish homographs, which, like wine, are written in the same way, regardless of their meaning, and homophones, which are pronounced equal or almost equal and they are written differently (for example had, from the verb tener, and tube, noun).

Regarding polysemy, the Spanish Urgent Foundation (Fundeu) describes it as «the phenomenon whereby the same word, with a single origin, can have different meanings whose functioning morphological and syntagmatic does not vary (the latter means that its grammatical category does not change nor the syntactic functions it can perform).”

In this way, the main difference between homonymy and polysemy is found in the etymology, or origin of the words.