Monosemantic word – a word having only one meaning: hydrogen, molecule.

1 : to strike or be struck by (someone or something) forcefully. 2 : to cause or allow (something) to come into contact with something He hit his head on the door. 3 : to affect or be affected by in a harmful or damaging way He was hit hard by the loss.

Updated February 25, 2019. The words beat and beet are homophones: they sound alike but have different meanings.

In semantics, a meronym is a word that denotes a constituent part or a member of something. For example, apple is a meronym of apple tree (sometimes written as applemeronymy. Adjective: meronymous. The whole-to-part relationship is called holonymy.

“Narrower terms for Color” https://www.classicthesaurus.com/color/narrower (accessed June 11, 2021)….List search.

Semantic structure of polysemantic words

• A dull book, a dull film – uninteresting, monotonous, boring.
• A dull student – slow in understanding, stupid.
• Dull weather, a dull day, a dull colour – not clear or bright.
• A dull sound – not loud or distinct.
• A dull knife – not sharp.
• Trade is dull – not active.
• Dull eyes (arch.) – seeing badly.
• Dull ears (arch.)

Monosemantic words, which have only one meaning, are comparatively few; they are mainly scientific terms (e.g. hydrogen) or rare words (e.g. flamingo). The bulk of English words are polysemantic.

A word is polysemous if it can be used to express different meanings. The difference between the meanings can be obvious or subtle. • Two or more words are homonyms if they either sound the same (homophones), have the same spelling (homographs), or both, but do not have related meanings.

In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation, as propounded by Michael Halliday, is the expression strong tea.

Allegories

Words have many meanings because the language IS developed. As a language develops, new usages, meanings, subtleties and nuances arise. You make me think of the Latin preposition ad. That two letter word has 46 definitions in the Oxford Latin Dictionary.