  On the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others are prepared to embrace it. One finds this sort of denial prominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato.  Indeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for Aristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and invariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity, or homonymy in his technical terminology. In the opening of the Categories, Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy and homonymy  (later called univocity and multivocity). His preferred phrase for multivocity, which is extremely common in his writings, is  ‘being spoken of in many ways’, or, more simply, ‘multiply meant’ (pollachôs legomenon). All these locutions have a quasi-technical status for him. The least complex is univocity: