One thing that I thought was pretty cool was to find out that глубокий means “deep”, as in “This well is very deep”, but also means “profound”. I thought that this was a homonym, but Wikipedia implies that a true homonym requires the two meanings to be starkly different, such as “stalk” meaning the part of a plant and also the act of following someone around. It could be argued that “profound” could also be thought of as “deep thought”. Wikipedia says:
Polysemes are words with the same spelling and distinct but related meanings. The distinction between polysemy and homonymy is often subtle and subjective, and not all sources consider polysemous words to be homonyms. Words such as “mouth”, meaning either the orifice on one’s face, or the opening of a cave or river, are polysemous and may or may not be considered homonyms.
What is interesting to me about it is that it is a polyseme in both Russian and English for the same things. Another shared polyseme is тупой, which means dull, as in the edge of a knife. But it also means a person who is dim-witted.
So I’m on the hunt for more words that share polysemetic meanings between English and Russian. Each new word gets you a free word! :-)
