A study investigated the development of children's metalinguistic understanding of the meanings of two non-ostensive words beyond the usual semantic acquisition period. The words, whose meanings cannot be associated with an object by pointing, were "pain" and "pretend". Two specific questions were addressed: What types of explanations do children of different ages offer to metalinguistic questions focusing on the words' meaning?; and How do children adjust the meaning(s) they assign to the word in accordance with the linguistic context in which the word occurs? Each word was studied in relation to numerous other words commonly co-occurring in the language. Metalinguistic questions were asked in a flexible interview situation. Results reveal the importance of accounting for alterations in word meaning in different linguistic contexts and offer a new direction for vocabulary assessment and intervention. Word meaning is by its nature difficult to formalize in an elegant theory, with meaning varying greatly with linguistic context. (MSE)