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Words with multiple definitions tend to cause the greatest problems, because the individual definitions may not be ambiguous. The ambiguity arises because the reader may not be certain as to which definition is intended by the editor.
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".
Words which are inherently ambiguous (equivocal) should be avoided. However, there are many words which are ambiguous because they have more than one interpretation or definition. Words with multiple interpretations are generally used to express a point of view. Use of such words is governed by Wikipedia's policy on neutrality.
from construe: the assigning of meaning to ambiguous terms road construction and maintenance work; roadwork ("a construction area/zone") (UK: roadworks) cooker an appliance for cooking food (US: cookstove, stove, range) a cooking apple, a large sour apple used in cooking
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]
An illustration of a weasel using "weasel words". In this case, "some people" are a vague and undefined authority. In rhetoric, a weasel word, or anonymous authority, is a word or phrase aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said, when in fact only a vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant claim has been communicated.
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. [27]
A locally ambiguous sentence is a sentence that contains an ambiguous phrase but has only one interpretation. [5] The ambiguity in a locally ambiguous sentence briefly stays and is resolved, i.e., disambiguated, by the end of the speech.