For example, the two senses which are distinguished in English as people and village are colexified in Spanish, which uses pueblo in both cases.
Colexification is meant as a neutral descriptive term that avoids distinguishing between vagueness, polysemy, and homonymy.
“A given language is said to colexify two functionally distinct senses if, and only if, it can associate them with the same lexical form.” The term was coined by the linguist Alexandre François in his 2008 article “Semantic maps and the typology of colexification”.
This article illustrated the notion with various examples, including the semantic domains of { STRAIGHT }, { CALL }, { BREATHE }.
The latter notion is at the source of a colexification network that is attested in several languages, linking together such senses as ‘breath’, ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘ghost’...: Skr.