polymorphism

noun

• the occurrence of something in several different forms, in particular:
• Biology the occurrence of different forms among the members of a population or colony, or in the life cycle of an individual organism: the workers of this species exhibit polymorphism, specialized physical castes
• Genetics the presence of genetic variation within a population, upon which natural selection can operate.
• Computing a feature of a programming language that allows routines to use variables of different types at different times: object oriented programming introduces novel features like polymorphism