Polysemy is the phenomenon of co-existence of multiple senses within one single linguistic expression. It is also the core issue of Augusto Soares da Silva’s anthology of essays on “the world of meanings in Portuguese”, which sums up more than 15 years of research on polysemy, semantics and cognition. As the subtitle suggests, the author’s approach to the phenomenon of related meanings is a cognitive one. This means that beyond the description of linguistic meanings and the way they are inventoried in single linguistic expressions, the author is concerned with the underlying cognitive operations that establish and stabilize the relations between meanings and that allow for these different meanings to be expressed by the same linguistic form. In other words, the fact that different meanings are conveyed by one single expression reveals an underlying schematic relatedness which sustains the often apparent arbitrariness in the linguistic reference.