A term you'll meet in diction and meaning.
Two words can point to the same thing and still feel completely different. That gap is the difference between denotation and connotation — and it's where much of a writer's power lives.
The denotation of a word is its literal, agreed-upon definition — what you'd find in a dictionary, stripped of feeling. "Home" denotes the place where one lives. "House," "residence," and "dwelling" denote roughly the same thing.
The connotation is the cloud of associations, emotions, and values a word carries beyond its definition. "Home" connotes warmth, belonging, safety. "Residence" connotes something formal, even cold. "Dwelling" sounds bare, almost anthropological. Same denotation; utterly different feeling.
Choosing between near-synonyms is how writers control tone. Calling a character "thin" is neutral; "slender" flatters; "scrawny" judges; "gaunt" worries. None of these change the literal fact. They change how you feel about it. This is the engine behind diction — word choice — and a major part of how a text builds its mood.
When a passage feels loaded and you can't say why, test the key words: swap each for a plain synonym and see what evaporates. What you lose in the swap is the connotation — the writer's thumb on the scale. Propaganda, advertising, and political language all run on connotation, which is why learning to hear it is a form of self-defence as much as literary skill.
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