meaning

1. 1.

   the message that is intended or expressed or signified

   “what is the meaning of this sentence”

   “the significance of a red traffic light”

   “the signification of Chinese characters”

   “the import of his announcement was ambiguous”

   Synonymssignificancesignificationimport

   Broadermessage

   Narrowerlexical meaninggrammatical meaningsymbolizationsenseintensionreferenteffectintentmoralnuance
2. 2.

   the idea that is intended

   “What is the meaning of this proverb?”

   Synonymssubstance

   Broaderidea

   Narrowersemanticssignificancetenorundertonereferenceconnotation

1. 1.

   rich in significance or implication

   “a meaning look”

   “a significant silence”

   Synonymspregnantsignificant

   Similarmeaningful

Other forms of meaning

plural

meanings·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about meaning

What does meaning mean?

meaning means "the message that is intended or expressed or signified". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in meaning?

meaning has 2 syllables: mea-ning. The stress falls on "mea". In IPA it is /ˈminɪŋ/.

What is another word for meaning?

Close synonyms include significance, signification, import, substance, pregnant. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is meaning a common word?

meaning is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with meaning?

1 word rhymes with meaning. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.