I recently played the Categories Game with a group of friends. You know the one: each person in the circle says a word in the category, starting with the last letter of the previous word. cat leads to tarantula, then to anteater, and so on. And of course, if you repeat a word then you lose. Here, every category is a hypernym: a category a word belongs to. A dog is an animal, alongside pigeons and leopards. With fungi and plants, an animal is likewise a living being. Pretending for a moment that a word belongs to only one category, we can build a hierarchical tree of all words.

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