a vineyard: a planted plot of grapevines, often walled or hedged and worked for its fruit and wine.
A vineyard in the Bible is a settled, deliberate piece of farmland. You clear the stones, plant the vines, build a wall or hedge around it, dig a press, and sometimes set a watchtower in the middle. It takes years before it bears, so owning one is a sign of a stable, planted life rather than a wandering one. That is why the word turns up so often in promises of the good land and in laws about who may eat from it, lend against it, or harvest it.
Because a vineyard costs so much patience and care, it became one of the Bible's favorite pictures for something a person prizes and tends. When the prophets and poets want to talk about what God has lovingly planted and expects fruit from, they reach for this word. Israel itself is pictured as the Lord's vineyard, and the disappointment when it yields bad grapes is the disappointment of a grower betrayed by his own field.
The figurative use is not a different word with a different meaning. It is the same vineyard, now standing for a people or a beloved. The reader is meant to hear the literal farm underneath, with all its labor and hope, so that the loss or ruin of the vineyard lands as a real grief.