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Some words have multiple interpretations and have different meanings dependent upon one's perspective. What one source describes as a 'war', may be described as an 'invasion' by the other side. Use of such words tends to be seen as advocating the views of one side over the other, unless they are clearly attributed to the correct side.
For the second portion of the list, see List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z. Asterisked (*) meanings, though found chiefly in the specified region, also have some currency in the other region; other definitions may be recognised by the other as Briticisms or Americanisms respectively.
The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam: ambiguous use of a pronoun: The word "it" refers to the table being made of Styrofoam; but "it" would immediately refer to the large ball if we replaced "Styrofoam" with "steel" without any other change in its syntactic parse. [26]
The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase applies to it having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. [4] "Meaning" here refers to whatever should be represented by a good dictionary. For instance, the word "bank" has several distinct lexical definitions, including "financial institution" and "edge of a river".
The higher the number of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. [1] Like other kinds of ambiguity, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous word is used is strongly influenced by the general structure of the sentence. [2]
This list has been split between: List of words having different meanings in American and British English (A–L) List of words having different meanings in American and British English (M–Z)
A list of 100 words that occur most frequently in written English is given below, based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts in the English language, comprising over 2 billion words). [1]
Weasel words are words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said, when in fact only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated. A common form of weasel wording is through vague attribution, where a statement is dressed with authority , yet has no substantial basis.