A term coined by Alan Cruse. A facet is a word sense that is due to the part-whole structure of an entity and is selected by a specific utterance context. As with a sub-sense, a facet is context-dependent, because the distinctions between facets only arise in certain sentential contexts. For example, consider the lexical item book. By virtue of its structure, the concept book consists of both text (the informational content of a book) and tome (the physical entity consisting of pages and binding). However, these facets only become apparent in certain sentential contexts. This is illustrated below:

1. That book is really heavy
2. That book is really interesting The example in (1) refers to the tome facet of book while (2) refers to the text facet. It is sentential context (the presence of the expressions thick versus interesting) rather than context of use that induces a particular facet.