In programming, polymorphism refers to the ability of different objects to respond to the same message (method call) in different ways. This allows for more flexible and modular code, as methods can be written to accept objects of a superclass, and then different subclasses can provide their own implementations of those methods. This concept is fundamental to object-oriented programming (OOP) and is often associated with inheritance and dynamic dispatch. The word "polymorphism" indeed comes from the Greek roots "poly" meaning "many" and "morph" meaning "form", so it literally translates to "many forms".