On the other hand, homonymy can be defined as the relation between terms and concepts in which identical terms represent different concepts, for example:
- bark: sound made by a dog
- bark: outer covering of the stems of woody plants
- bark: sailing vessel
[Source: according to ISO 1087, p. 5]
Among the sub-forms of homonymy there are:
a) Homography: case of homonymy in which the terms have the same written form, e.g.:
- address (n) vs. (to) address (v)
- record (n) vs. (to) record (v)
b) Homophony: case of homonymy in which the terms have the same spoken form, e.g.:
- blew vs. blue ("The wind blew" / "The sky is blue")
- hear vs. here ("Did you hear?" / "I am here")
[Source: according to ISO 1087, p. 5]
Homonymy and Polysemy
It is worth noting that there is also a difference between homonymy and polysemy seen from a diachronic perspective. We talk about homonymy if identical terms representing different concepts have different etymological origins. On the other hand, when a term gets several meanings during its diachronic development it is often called polysemous.
One should therefore avoid having an entry containing two definitions of two different concepts in a terminlogy database on one specific subject field, as the following example shows:
Entry number: 29
English Term: Script
Type: Full form
- Definition: A set of user-defined instructions which a computer program executes. Usually used to customise the behaviour of the application. Examples of scripting languages include Perl, JavaScript and VBScript
- Definition: A collection of characters for displaying written text, all of which have a common characteristic that justifies their consideration as a distinct set. One script may be used for several different languages (for example, Latin script, which covers all of Western Europe). However, some written languages require multiple scripts, for example Japanese, which requires at least three scripts (the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, and the Kanji ideographs imported from China)