. The property, had by some terms, of having two or more meanings. Ambiguity is not the same as VAGUENESS. ‘Bald’ is vague (how many hairs can a bald man have?) but not ambiguous. An ambiguous term can be quite precise in each of its...

In natural languages, property of expressions that can be interpreted in several ways, or, rather, that can be multiply specified in linguistic description from lexical, semantic, syntactic, and other aspects. In this sense, ambiguity is different from...

// n. The phenomenon in which a single string of words receives two or more sharply distinct meanings. An ambiguity may be purely lexical, as in This lovely port is mentioned in Captain Cook’s diaries, or it may be structural, as in Young boys...

n. Any criterion proposed for distinguishing true ambiguity from instances of mere vagueness. An example is the contradiction test, by which the putatively acceptable example That dog isn’t a dog—it’s a bitch supposedly demonstrates...

// n. An ambiguity involving the assignment of two or more syntactic structures to a string. See examples under...

Ambiguity is the property of words, terms, notations, signs, symbols, and concepts (within a particular context) as being undefined, indefinable, multi-defined, or without an obvious definition, and thus having a misleading, or unclear, meaning. A word,...