A language such as English has many words each having different and distinct meanings. For example, I discovered a scientific paper that lacked either a clearly stated hypothesis or a clearly stated conclusion. In speculating a conclusiom, I first formulated a declarative sentence which I realized to have 6 critical terms, each of which has at least 3 disparate meanings in the literature of this science. This means that this conclusion has at least 3⁶ = 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 729 meanings.

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ORAL AND WRITTEN COMBINATORIAL LINGUISTICS The above paragrph implicitly assumes that this multiplicity of meanings arises from written English. But, at another file at this website, noting its absence in the literature, I formulate a label ("fonym") for a spoken word (such as "to" or "two") with two or more distinct meanings. Hence, the need for the distinction made in the title of this section.