It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence. - John Langshaw Austin

Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?

But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense "red" and "blue" any more than "resemblance" (or "qualities" any more than "relations"): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that "this is red."

Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.