This particular example is loosely based on Quillian (1968). Quillian suggested that one of the functions of semantic memory, conceived in this graphical way, was to enable word sense disambiguation through spreading activation. For example, processing of the sentence,  “He watered the plants”, would involve activation of the terms water and plant, and this activation would spread to concepts immediately associated with (i.e., directly linked to) those terms, and in turn to the neighbors of those concepts, and so on. The preferred senses of the initially activated terms would be those that led to early “intersection” of activation signals originating from different terms.  In particular, the activation signals propagating from sense 1 (the living-plant sense) of plant  would reach the concept for the stuff, water, in four steps (along the pathways corresponding to the information that plants may get food from water), and the same concept would be reached in two steps from the term water, used as a verb, whose semantic representation would express the idea of supplying water to some target object. Though the sense of plant  as a manufacturing apparatus would probably lead eventually to the water concept as well, the corresponding activation path would be longer, and so the living-plant sense of plant would “win”.