meaning-in-context and meaning have a fairly high overlap rate of 26% which means that 26% of all questions tagged meaning-in-context are also tagged meaning. The full list of ~375 don't reveal anything terribly interesting about the association. It seems that our taggers consider meaning-in-context a subtag of meaning.
But here are the relevant tag-wikis:
About meaning
This tag should be used for questions asking about nuances of meaning and definitions for a word or phrase. For a good explanation of how to write a good meaning question, please read this blog article.
If you are asking about the meaning of a word in a given context, please use the more specific meaning-in-context instead.
For questions relating to the origin of a word, its evolution over time, or the earliest known citation, etymology should be used.
About meaning-in-context
meaning-in-context is for questions about understanding English speech, or writing at a level above individual words or phrases.
Oftentimes, the literal meaning of a word or idiom is clear, but it's not obvious what the significance is of that word in the context of a whole paragraph or article. This tag also marks requests for help understanding allusions to literature, pop culture, politics, current events, or other elements of English language usage which depend on a broader context.
The tag-wiki for meaning explicitly notes that you should use meaning-in-context instead of meaning when relevant so it seems that these are intended to be mutually exclusive tags.
Is this intention still accurate? Do we still want to explicitly distinguish between these two tags?
