It turns out that people are not equally aware of all the senses of polysemous words presented in dictionaries. The perception of senses depends on their proximity to the literal meaning of the word.

In this study, the authors chose a set of ten so-called polysemous words -- words with multiple meanings -- such as bear, jam, just, rock or present.

They chose 50 target words in the corpus that could be identified as polysemous, including 17 words from Greek technical vocabulary and 33 words from the highest-frequency lemmas (forms chosen to ...

Geoff Pullum firmly endorses a sentiment expressed by Steven Pinker: Words have multiple meanings, and taking offense at unintended senses or associations of words is neither rational nor mature.