“Multivocal” developed from the Latin word “multivocus” (“expressed by many words”), first recorded by 19th-century poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. If you encounter a multivocal word, it may be a homonym. Homonyms may be spelled alike or have the same pronunciation, but they have different meanings and often etymologies — such as “bat” (“a baseball tool” and “a flying mammal”), “lead” (“a metal” and a verb meaning “to guide”), and “write”/”right” (“mark [letters, words, or other symbols] on a surface”/”true or correct as a fact”).