In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein's response to this problem are the concepts of "language games" and "family resemblance." From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#LangGameFam...:

> Still, just as we cannot give a final, essential definition of ‘game’, so we cannot find “what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language” (PI 65).

> There is no reason to look, as we have done traditionally—and dogmatically—for one, essential core in which the meaning of a word is located and which is, therefore, common to all uses of that word. We should, instead, travel with the word’s uses through “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (PI 66).