Thanks a lot! It was my fault that I assumed native speakers know every definition of a word - sometimes so many. It would be impossible to know almost ten definitions of a word as if carrying a dictionary in your brain.
You appear to think that we use words after we have learnt the dictionary definitions of them. It's the other way round. Lexicographers write dictionary definitions in an attempt to describe how people use words.
When somebody looks up a word in a dictionary, they are only discovering a generalisation of how most people use the word. If I say "Oh, I didn't know that
word X could mean
yyyyy", all I am saying is that I did not know that some people used the word with that particular sense. Users of language define words, and lexicographers attempt to record this.
If six moderators, all native speakers, each write in this forum, "My
partner's
desk is too
large for our new flat', we may have rather different ideas in our minds of the actual people/things denoted by the words in red. Generally speaking, the context of the utterance will give the listener a reasonably clear idea of what the speaker is talking about, but we can never know exactly. It doesn't matter. As the speaker has used the word 'flat' in this limited context, s/he is more likely to be British than American, and is more likely to be speaking of a place to live in rather than an uninflated tyre. Whether British or American, s/he is more likely to be talking of a person with whom s/he lives and to whom s/he is probably not married rather than a business associate (though that person could be both).
This is why some of your attempts to discover the precise meanings of words appear pointless to some of us. It
should be pretty obvious that, unless the context tells us otherwise, given the choice between 'a piece of furniture like a table [...] where you work' and 'an office at a newspaper [...] that deals with a particular subject' (OALD definitions) that the speaker is thinking in terms of the first definition of 'desk'
in this utterance. It is pointless to worry about whether the desk is made of wood, metal plastic, has drawers, is new or old, etc.
Depending on the model and age of the vacuum cleaners we possess, my idea of the word 'thrum' may well involve more decibels than SD's and fewer than Tdol's. Nobody worries about this. If I happen to be in Tdol's palace and he shouts, "I can't hear you over the thrum of my maid's vacuum cleaner", I may respond, "That's not a thrum, that's a roar". We know then that we have a different idea in our minds of an appropriate decibel-level for 'thrum', but normally this would be of little consequence; we'd normally never know.