This question arose in my Facebook Learn Mandarin Chinese and English Group (which has only several members) asked by a woman who adopted a young Mandarin speaking teen from China (hence her keen interest in Mandarin.)

I had mentioned 京华时报 - Jīnghuá shí bào - Beijing Times

and she writes: Beijing just means North Jing, right? I know that shi has more meanings than practically any other word (is, ten, time, I think there are more.) Some take different accents, but others like 'to be' and time, I think are said the same.

I replied:

I will pose this question to http://skritter.com/ forum and see what members have to say. (followed by much praise for Skritter).

QUESTION: Can you think of several words which are frequently used in many contexts having many very different meanings?

Of course, I am also googling for an answer.

Here is an EXCELLENT example of and English word with 100 meanings

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060905042257AAUpZab

http://www.the-orient-express.com/zhongguo/2011/05/180/

I WOULD LIKE TO RESTATE MY QUESTION in terms of the average American student who might see a particular SOUND (phoneme) as having many different meanings and occurring frequently APART from differences in tone or Hanji character.

Thanks for your input!

Well, in answer to your question as you have rephrased it, yes, there are very, very many. This is why you really cannot ignore tones or characters when learning Chinese, even as a beginner. The three examples of shi that your fellow learner has given are all different characters: is=是(fourth tone), ten=十(second tone),and time=时(also second tone). No Chinese speaker would ever think of these as being the same word; they are not.

If you try to study pinyin only and don't learn tones, Chinese will remain incomprehensible, because the language uses a very limited number of sounds and consequently has many, many homonyms.

Of course, there are single characters that can also have many different meanings. 当(dang1), for example, has the following meanings according to mdbg: to be / to act as / manage / withstand / when / during / ought / should / match equally / equal / same / obstruct / just at (a time or place) / on the spot / right / just at.

Thanks! This helps! I will convey your explanation to my fellow learner. I kind of realized the importance of the tones and the possibility that my fellow learner did not. When tones are different and when characters are different then surely any imagined similarity is merely an artifact of ones lack of familiarity/experience.

I agree with Junglegirl that an understanding of the characters is very important as you will then start to think of the words (or parts of words) as different, even if they are the same syllable or even have the same tone as well.

Shi is a great example of a syllable that has many different meanings and also many different characters, I seem to remember reading that there are 40 characters for shì (4th tone) alone, although don't quote me on that, my memory isn't what it used to be!

There is a poem that was written to prove the importance of characters rather than just sounds and it uses only the syllable 'shi'. It's been mentioned a few times on here, but you might find it interesting,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

@HappyBlue

The Wikipedia article on the poem's author gives a more precise description of the poem's original intent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuen_Ren_Chao

"This example is often used as an argument against the romanization of Chinese. In fact, the text was an argument against the romanization of Classical Chinese and Chao was actually for the romanization modern vernacular written Chinese; he was one of the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh."