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Is there a name use to describe tuples of the form (word, meaning)? Example:

  1. ("wood", the material made from trees)
  2. ("wood", a geographical area with many trees)

In this case we have only one word but two word/meaning pairs. These pairs are distinct both from the word and from the meaning. In other words the second pair cannot be reduced to its meaning, because "wood" is synonymous with "forest", and the tuple

  1. ("forest", a geographical area with many trees)

is a distinct tuple from the one in 2.

1 Answer 1

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A specific term is unknown to me, but the task of disentangling the meanings of a word is named word sense disambiguation in computational linguistics. So I think word sense is usable for the pair (word, meaning) even without being a formal term.

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