A Word to the Wise A Word to the Wise A Word to the Wise is a 1770 comedy play by the Irish writer Hugh Kelly. It was his second work after the 1767 hit "False Delicacy". Kelly was known as a supporter of the government, and an opponent of the radical John Wilkes. During the second performance of the play a riot broke out amongst Wilkes' supporters at the Drury Lane Theatre and the play was subsequently withdrawn. When it was published instead Kelly wrote a long introduction defending himself and complaining about political prejudice. It was the first play performed at The Theatre,
Word sense Word sense In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word (some words have multiple meanings, some words have only one meaning). For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows: In each sentence we associate a different meaning of the word "play" based on hints the rest of the sentence gives us. People and computers, as they read words, must use a process called word-sense disambiguation to find the correct