Editing Hypernymy and hyponymy (section)

== Usage ==
[[Computer science]] often terms this relationship an "[[is-a]]" relationship. For example, the phrase "Red is-a color" can be used to describe the hyponymic relationship between ''red'' and ''color''.
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Hyponymy is the most frequently encoded relation among [[Synonym ring|synsets]] used in lexical databases such as [[WordNet]]. These semantic relations can also be used to compare [[semantic similarity]] by judging the distance between two synsets and to analyse [[anaphora (linguistics)|anaphora]].

As a hypernym can be understood as a more general word than its hyponym, the relation is used in [[semantic compression]] by generalization to reduce a level of [[Specialization (linguistics)|specialization]].

The notion of hyponymy is particularly relevant to [[language translation]], as hyponyms are very common across languages. For example, in Japanese the word for older brother is {{nihongo||兄|ani}}, and the word for younger brother is {{nihongo||弟|otōto}}. An English-to-Japanese translator presented with a phrase containing the English word ''brother'' would have to choose which Japanese word equivalent to use. This would be difficult, because abstract information (such as the speakers' relative ages) is often not available during [[machine translation]].