---
license: cc-by-4.0
pretty_name: "Hebrew Word Senses — polysemy inventory, Hebrew-context derived"
language:
  - hbo
tags:
  - biblical-hebrew
  - lexicography
  - word-sense-disambiguation
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files: "hbo_lex.tsv"
---

# Hebrew Word Senses

Which Biblical Hebrew lexemes are polysemous (have more than one distinct meaning), and how their
occurrences cluster into each sense — 12,536 sense-rows across ~8,015 (lexeme, verbal-stem) groups.

## Method

**Sense-cluster structure** (which occurrences belong to which sense) is decided entirely from Hebrew:
occurrences of a (lexeme, stem) are grouped by their English gloss, then merged whenever their Hebrew-
clause embedding centroids are close (single-linkage clustering) — the question "are these the same
sense?" is answered by how the word is actually used in Hebrew context, not by an English label. No
UBS/SDBH data is involved in this step at any point.

**Gloss labels** (the human-readable name for each sense) come from two sources:
- The **dominant** sense of each group (its most common meaning) uses
  [`bcv-commons/strongs`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/bcv-commons/strongs)'s own vetted gloss.
- Every other (**sub-**)sense uses Cherith Glosses (Andi Wu, Copyright 2022, CC BY 4.0) via MACULA's
  own `@gloss` attribute — confirmed via [MACULA-Hebrew's own
  LICENSE](https://github.com/Clear-Bible/macula-hebrew/blob/main/LICENSE.md) to be a distinct,
  separately-licensed source, **not** SDBH/UBS MARBLE.

## Columns

| column | meaning |
|---|---|
| `lex` | ETCBC/BHSA lexeme id |
| `stem` | verbal stem (binyan) — blank for non-verbs |
| `sense` | sense number within this (lex, stem) group; `1` is always the dominant sense |
| `gloss` | the English label for this sense (see Method above for provenance) |
| `count` | how many occurrences fall in this sense-cluster |
| `share` | `count` / the group's total occurrences — `sense=1`'s share tells you how polysemous the word actually is in practice (a word with `sense=1` at 99% share is barely polysemous despite having other senses tagged) |

## License

CC BY 4.0. Sense-cluster structure: independently derived, no restricted source. Dominant-sense
glosses: from `bcv-commons/strongs`. Sub-sense glosses: Cherith Glosses (Andi Wu, CC BY 4.0), via
MACULA (Clear-Bible/macula-hebrew, CC BY 4.0) — not derived from or reproducing UBS MARBLE / SDBH.

## Provenance

Built by `bcv-RAG/scripts/cluster_senses_hebrew.py` (clustering) and
`shoresh/macula/build_hbo_lex_export.py` (publish-ready gloss substitution) in
[bcv-commons/bcv-query](https://github.com/bcv-commons/bcv-query).