1. Association: This is the most common way that words acquire their meaning. When we hear a word, we associate it with something that we already know. For example, the word "dog" is associated with the animal that barks and has four legs.

2. Convention: This is when a word is assigned a meaning by agreement. For example, the word "red" is assigned the meaning of the color that is associated with fire and blood.

3. Metaphor: This is when a word is used to describe something that it is not literally. For example, we might say that someone is "a couch potato" to mean that they are lazy.

4. Metonymy: This is when a word is used to refer to something that is closely associated with it. For example, we might say that someone is "going to the White House" to mean that they are going to meet with the president.

5. Onomatopoeia: This is when a word is created to imitate the sound that something makes. For example, the word "buzz" is an onomatopoeia for the sound that a bee makes.

6. Semantic drift: This is when the meaning of a word changes over time. For example, the word "nice" originally meant "foolish" or "stupid", but it has now come to mean "kind" or "agreeable".

7. Borrowing: This is when a word is taken from another language. For example, the word "kimono" is a Japanese word that means "full-length robe".