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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. Additional usage ...
If separating words using spaces is also permitted, the total number of known possible meanings rises to 58. [38] Czech has the syllabic consonants [r] and [l], which can stand in for vowels. A well-known example of a sentence that does not contain a vowel is Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick your finger through the neck."
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]
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.
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.
While convergent semantic processing and the activation of common word meanings and semantic features are advantageous for various linguistic tasks, the left hemisphere faces challenges in scenarios where the recognition of an ambiguous word requires the activation of multiple primes that can either converge into a subordinate meaning or ...
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