In human language, a phoneme is the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but, in theoretical terms, cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them.
An example of a phoneme is the /t/ sound in the words tip, stand, water, and cat. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.) These instances of /t/ are considered to be the same sound despite the fact that in each word they are pronounced somewhat differently.

In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds (phones) that belong to the same phoneme.
Semantics (Greek σημαντικός semantikos significant, from semainein to signify, mean, from sema sign, token), is the study of meaning in communication. In linguistics it is the study of interpretation of signs as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.[1] It has related meanings in several other fields.
Semanticists differ on what constitutes meaning in an expression. For example, in the sentence, "John loves a bagel", the word bagel may refer to the object itself, which is its literal meaning or denotation, but it may also refer to many other figurative associations, such as how it meets John's hunger, etc., which may be its connotation. Traditionally, the formal semantic view restricts semantics to its literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to pragmatics, but this distinction is increasingly difficult to defend[2]. The degree to which a theorist subscribes to the literal-figurative distinction decreases as one moves from the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions. synonym A word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in a language
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Polysemes
A polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple, related meanings
In linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same