Hyponymy (Noun)
Meaning
The semantic relation of being subordinate or belonging to a lower rank or class.
Classification
Nouns denoting relations between people or things or ideas.
Examples
- The concept of hyponymy is crucial in understanding the hierarchical structure of a lexical database, where words are organized in a tree-like fashion with hypernyms and hyponyms.
- In linguistics, hyponymy is a fundamental relation that holds between words, such as "car" being a hyponym of "vehicle".
- The study of hyponymy is essential in natural language processing, as it enables computers to reason about the relationships between words and their meanings.
- Hyponymy is a key concept in thesaurus construction, where words are grouped into categories based on their semantic relationships.
- The distinction between hyponymy and other semantic relations, such as synonymy and antonymy, is critical in understanding the nuances of word meaning.