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The ambiguity arises because the reader may not be certain as to which definition is intended by the editor. In such cases, always provide sufficient context or explanation to make it clear to any reader which definition is intended. In some cases wording can be ambiguous although the words are not.
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
In mathematics and logic, ambiguity can be considered to be an instance of the logical concept of underdetermination—for example, = leaves open what the value of is—while overdetermination, except when like =, =, =, is a self-contradiction, also called inconsistency, paradoxicalness, or oxymoron, or in mathematics an inconsistent system ...
Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy . For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or ...
Compounds are units of meaning formed with two or more words. The words are usually written separately, but some may be hyphenated or be written as one word. Often the meaning of the compound can be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words. It is not always simple to detach collocations and compounds. car park; post office; narrow ...
Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. The obfuscation might be either unintentional or intentional (although intent usually is connoted), and is accomplished with circumlocution (talking around the subject), the use of jargon (technical language of a profession), and ...
According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression comes from the rare and obsolete French expression, which literally meant "double meaning" and was used in the senses of "double understanding" or "ambiguity" but acquired its current suggestive twist in English after being first used in 1673 by John Dryden.
In computer science, an ambiguous grammar is a context-free grammar for which there exists a string that can have more than one leftmost derivation or parse tree. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Every non-empty context-free language admits an ambiguous grammar by introducing e.g. a duplicate rule.