a word to which an independent meaning can be given by reference to a world outside any sentence in which the word may occur
Compare function word, lexical meaning
content word in American English
noun
a word, typically a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, that carries semantic content, bearing reference to the world independently of its use within a particular sentence (distinguished from function word)
Word origin
[1935–40]This word is first recorded in the period 1935–40. Other words that entered Englishat around the same time include: Arts and Crafts Movement, aeroembolism, fluorocarbon, gangbuster, prime mover
Examples of 'content word' in a sentence
content word
Given a content word, we first extract similar words based on a large corpus and a similarity score for ranking.
Peng Jin, John Carroll, Yunfang Wu, Diana McCarthy 2012, 'Distributional Similarity for Chinese: Exploiting Characters and Radicals', Mathematical Problems in Engineeringhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/347257. Retrieved from DOAJ CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)