semantically

[ si-man-tik-lee ]

adverb

1. in a way that relates to the different meanings of words or other signs or symbols:

   Humans have developed languages that are semantically rich and can cope easily with philosophical concepts.

2. in a way that deliberately takes advantage of the connotations or associations attached to certain words:

   He deals with this bombing campaign semantically by saying it is “not a war” since there are “no hostile troops on the ground.”

Other Words From

• non·se·man·ti·cal·ly adverb
• pseu·do·se·man·ti·cal·ly adverb

Word History and Origins

Origin of semantically¹

semantic ( def ) + -ally ( def )

Example Sentences

Discussing the Ethics Commission can be semantically tricky.

From Los Angeles Times

Additionally, she said, the way users generate queries is not semantically different for the different stages of motivation, so it's not obvious from the language what their motivational states are.

From Science Daily

The bot then uses text snippets it finds that are semantically related to the question to get a more complete understanding of the context.

From Science Daily

Developers have to feed the network a number of texts so that it learns which words appear in similar environments and are thus semantically similar.

From Scientific American

Are the processors fast enough to detect the water and spit something out semantically while not draining the battery too fast?

From The Verge