Assistant professor, Dept. of Philosophy, Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute of Qom

The knowledge of polysemy and synonymy has long served to contribute to the field of interpretation. There has been a widespread difference of opinions among scholars, however, regarding the purpose and benefit of such knowledge. In the sources ever written on polysemy and synonymy, the selection of words and their semantic relationships are not well accounted for. Indeed, the corresponding discussions in those sources are complicated in terms of tenets and instances. Through a comparative study based on the etymological features of words and the pivotal role of denotations in understanding the Qur’anic verses, an attempt is made here to address the concerns of those who advocate the centrality of core meanings in the understanding of the Qur’an. The denotative core of a number of etymologically related words is like an axis to which those words converge. That is to say, lexical items of the same core can be packaged in one semantic category despite their nuances of meaning. In the present study, this issue is illustrated with the words haqh and qhest. The former is of various usages all with the core sense of vojoud (existence), but the latter is used in opposite terms all with tasallob (strictness) as their core meaning.