We are often confused by words with more than one meaning. There are lot of different words in English language that can make a real mess in our brains.
For example, the word date can be brown sweet fruit . “I ate some lovely dates.”
Or if you have a date with someone you have an appointment to meet this person.
“I’ve got a date with Mark next Friday".
Here are more examples-
BEAR
1.It can be a large mammal that lives in a forest: “There was a bearin the our back garden.”
2. If you can’t “bear” something, it’s too much for you:“I couldn’t bear the pain. It was awful.”
RUN
When you “run”, your legs move fast: “I’ve been running in the park.”
If you “run” a company, you direct or manage it:“She’s been running the company alone.”
There are 3 basic terms to describe the different types of words: homonyms, homophones and homographs.
Homonyms
Homonyms are words which have the same spelling and pronunciation, but have different meanings. For example:
I lit the fire with a match.
I got injured in the football match .
Homophones
Homophones are words which have the same pronunciation, but different spellings and meanings.
I saw eight friends at the park.
I ate a lot of food during weekend .
Homographs
Homographs are words that are spelt the same, but have different pronunciations and meanings.
There’s a tear in my trousers. [a hole] pronunciation: /teə/
He had a tear in his eye. [liquid that comes out of your eye] pronunciation: /tɪə/
As you can notice we pronounce it differently.
English can be difficult for learning because of idioms, homonyms, homographs and homophones.
Do you often use words with more than one meaning? I actually use homophones very often.
And such words make up the richness of a language. And there are a large number of them in Serbian.