Word sense

In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word play1, each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence. For example: In each sentence we associate a different meaning of the word "play" based on hints the rest of the sentence gives us.
See more at Wikipedia.org...

Noun
1. the accepted meaning of a word
(synonym) word meaning, acceptation
(hypernym) sense, signified