grammar - If a word has two different meanings, is it two different words or one word with different meanings?


My brother and sister-in-law are arguing about whether "train" meaning locomotive and "train" meaning teach constitutes one word with two different meanings or if it's two different words. I said that the etymology appears to be the same, so it would be one word with two different meanings ... but the more I think about it, the less sure I am that this is correct. One's a noun, the other is a verb, so ... does that make it two different words?


Help!



Answer



This is a question that is discussed by eminent British linguist David Crystal in his article How many words?, in which he attempts to come up with a reasonably accurate count of the number of words in the English language. Basically, he says that no accurate number is possible because there is no universally-agreed definition of what constitutes a word. Here is an extract that addresses your question, but provides no definitive answer:



Is the lock on a door the same basic meaning as the lock on a canal? Should ring (the shape) be kept separate from ring (the sound)? Are such cases 'the same word with different meanings' or 'different words'? These are the daily decisions that any word-counter (or dictionary compiler) must make.



The article is here (pdf): www.davidcrystal.com/?fileid=-4890


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