In terms of Java, when someone asks:
what is polymorphism?
Would overloading or overriding be
Polymorphism is the ability for an object to appear in multiple forms. This involves using inheritance and virtual functions to build a family of objects which can be interchanged. The base class contains the prototypes of the virtual functions, possibly unimplemented or with default implementations as the application dictates, and the various derived classes each implements them differently to affect different behaviors.