polysemy

"Many meanings", according to its etymology. Polysemy refers to a word with several distinct meanings. For example:

hacker: an exceptionally grokful guru, or (in media-ese) a script kiddie?
set (whose polysemy sets a record for the number of meanings for an English word)

Related terms include synonymy, which describes several words (synonyms) with at least one meaning in common.

Metonymy	PubGene	controlled vocabulary	Hjemmebrent
set	grok	Logic and Pragmatics of Attributive and Referential	F.R. Leavis
Smiley Face	Synonymy	literary language	semantics
Toki Pona: The Language of Good, Bad, and Ugly	Initial report on the incident at Epsilon Foxtrot	polyseme	self-referential
Federal Bureau of Investigation	WordNet	Martin Van Buren	Language

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