meaning of the "meant by"? [closed]

I often see questions started with "what is meant by...". What is "meant by"?

Any trying to Google it returns nothing helpful.

Thanks in advance.

Solution 1:

What is meant by X?

is the passive form of

What does X mean?

The idiomatic construction is meant by allows one to ask a question about meaning,
without having to leave the verb mean till the end of the question. If you want to know about the meaning of something, it makes sense to turn on the meaning detector and then say what the word is, instead of saying the word before you get to asking about its meaning.

Other question constructions like

• What is the meaning of X?

are common, for the same reason.

Mean, btw, is an irregular weak verb; i.e, its past tense form and past participle form are identical
like weak verbs; however, they're irregular in that they don't use the -ED suffix, but rather -T;
and they change pronunciation.

• mean, meant, meant is the list of principal parts of the verb, but
  /mi:n, mɛnt, mɛnt/ is their pronunciation.

Solution 2:

It means: what is the likely intent of the use a phrase.

This can be its direct communicative intent, or else the intention regarding tone, style, structure, and so on. It assumes that the use is a deliberate act, and seeks the reasoning behind that act.

Of course, this is strongly determined by context which is why supplying sufficient context to such questions is vital.

It has a range of meanings, of course, determined by context, but they principally ask for an interpretation of something in the fields of semantics or pragmatics in determining such denotation or connotations of a phrase.