---
title: "Polysemy in specialized lexicon from Old English to Present-Day"
description: "In Present-Day English, technological change is the main driver. 16 references. Among them: 2."
authors: ["Elvira Pérez Iglesias"]
year: 2015
venue: "Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 16"
source: "https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/134"
licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos)"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/iglesias-2015-polysemy-specialized-lexicon-old-english/"
---
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# Polysemy in specialized lexicon from Old English to Present-Day English

**Authors:** Elvira Pérez Iglesias · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** [Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 16](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/revista-de-lenguas-para-fines-especificos/) ([Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/revista-de-lenguas-para-fines-especificos/2015/)) · **Licence:** CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/134) · [PDF](https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/download/134/122) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1603898029)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The article traces how English specialized vocabulary has gained new meanings over time instead of always coining new forms. Pérez Iglesias treats polysemy as a tool of linguistic economy and flexibility. Her material is a set of terms taken from the OED, each recorded with the date, author and work where a given sense first appears. Most of the terms belong to seven fields: Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics, along with Law, Commerce, Computing and Technology. The study is qualitative and organised by period, from Old English through Middle, Early Modern and Modern English to Present-Day English. It follows paths such as general word → specialized sense (Old English *ceap*, *craeft*), technical term → spread into other fields (Middle English alchemy and astronomy), and older nautical, military, craft or legal words → Computing senses (*port*, *cartridge*, *spooler*). The main finding is that new senses mostly pile up beside old ones rather than replacing them, usually through analogy or metaphor, and occasionally through ellipsis. In Present-Day English, technological change is the main driver. The work matters because it documents how sense inventories grow over time, and that growth drives lexical ambiguity in technical text.

## Key points
- **Data source:** the OED and its supplements. Each sense carries a first-attestation date and source, for example *craeft* in the sense 'strength' (893, Ælfred's Orosius) and the 'trade/profession' sense around 900.
- **Domains covered:** Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics, together with Law, Commerce, Computing and Technology. Present-Day Computing senses are traced back to Law, Mathematics, sports and games, Fine, Practical and Minor Arts, and Nautical and Military Arts.
- **Middle English cross-domain senses:** *Jupiter*, *Mars* and *Mercury* each name a deity, a planet and a metal in alchemy (tin, iron and quicksilver; Chaucer, 1386).
- **Early Modern English mathematical terms with other field senses:**
  - *calculus*: medicine vs. mathematics
  - *helix*: geometry, architecture and anatomy
  - *hexagon*: geometry vs. fortification
  - *parabola*: rhetoric vs. geometry
  - *prism*: geometry vs. optics
- **Conclusions of the paper:**
  - Most OED addenda are new senses of existing words, not new words.
  - Older words tend to have more senses.
  - The author states that a technical term should keep one sense within each science.

## Interesting ideas
- The paper builds each sense inventory with a first-attestation date and a source, so meaning becomes a dated, layered history rather than a flat list; this makes it possible to explain why a sense exists and when it is plausible.
- The paper treats a technical term as unambiguous within one field, with cross-field senses behaving like homonyms; the field context therefore picks the sense.
- The paper describes ellipsis as a sense source: *eye-glass* / *drinking-glass* shrink to *glass*, and the full compound comes back whenever ambiguity arises.
- In the paper's material, old senses survive beside new ones, and older words collect more senses; word age works as a rough prior for how ambiguous a word is.
- The paper finds recurring metaphor paths in Computing vocabulary, such as nautical → data (*navigation*, *anchor*, *port*).

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (world): Domain and era tags on each WordNet/ontology sense would let the world model rule out anachronistic readings in older fables and tales, and say why.
- **I2** (frames): Frame building could take the document's domain (computing, law, geometry) as an explicit, logged constraint when choosing between senses like *port* = harbour vs. access route.
- **I3** (back): During generation, Mova could check whether a bare noun is ambiguous in the target meaning graph and fall back to the fuller compound to keep the text → graph → text round trip lossless.
- **I4** (learn): Evaluation sets for sense selection could deliberately include old, sense-heavy nouns (*craft*, *cell*, *port*) as hard cases, with domain-swapped contexts serving as negative controls.
- **I5** (world): Storing such systematic sense mappings as rules in the knowledge graph could help the world model handle new metaphorical uses without memorizing each one separately.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

Also on the byline: [Universidad de Salamanca](https://ror.org/02f40zc51).

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## Cite

Cite as: Elvira Pérez Iglesias. 2015. Polysemy in specialized lexicon from Old English to Present-Day English. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 16.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{iglesias2015polysemy,
  title = {{Polysemy in specialized lexicon from Old English to Present-Day English}},
  author = {Elvira Pérez Iglesias},
  booktitle = {Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 16},
  year = {2015},
  url = {https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/134}
}
```

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## References

16 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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13. Nerlich, B. (1990). Change in language. London & New York: Routledge. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Nerlich%2C+B%2E+%281990%29%2E+Change+in+language%2E+London+%26+New+York%3A+Routledge%2E)
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*Updated 29 October 2026*