Distributional hypothesis

The distributional hypothesis is the idea that words that are used and occur in the same contexts tend to convey similar meanings - "a word is characterized by the company it keeps".

This seems e.g. supported by the way language learners pick up the likely meaning of new words.

This idea is known under a few names, but note that few of them really describe a very specific or technique or further assumptions they make.

For example, distributional semantics says "we do that by looking at distributions", but actually little more than that.

Z S Harris (1954) "Distributional Structure"