A word of a natural language has 2.718 different meanings or slightly more.
The capacity of lexical decision-making in the brain conforms to the indefiniteness latent in natural languages. The average number of different meanings per word of a natural language is measured to be 2.805 +/- 0.005 irrespective of whether the language is Chinese, English or Japanese. If one can almost perfectly comprehend words and sentences written in a natural language in a context-dependent manner, the average number of different meanings per word would reduce to e (= 2.718281828459...), the base of natural or Napierian logarithms.
Matsuno
K
K
Technological University of Nagaoka, Japan.
Lu
J
J
D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D012660:Semantics