Ambiguity

An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction. Examples would be "bittersweet" or "cruel kindness". As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox. A general meaning of "contradiction in terms" is recorded by the 1902 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

thumb|upright=1.25|Punch (magazine)|Punch, 25 February 1914. The cartoon is a pun on the word "Jamaica", which pronunciation is a [[homonym to the clipped form of "Did you make her?" ]]

thumb|400px|Venn diagram showing the relationships between homophones (blue circle) and related linguistic concepts

thumb|250px|alt=Drawing of the back an anthropomorphic caterpillar, seated on a toadstool amid grass and flowers, blowing smoke from a hookah; a blonde girl in an old-fashioned frock is standing on tiptoe to peer at the caterpillar over the toadstool's edge|Sir John Tenniel's illustration of the Caterpillar for [[Lewis Carroll's ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' is noted for its ambiguous central figure, whose head can be viewed as either a man's face with a pointed nose and chin smoking a pipe or as the end of an actual caterpillar, with the first two right "true" legs visible (1865).]]

paradox that a heap of sand and a heap of sand minus one grain is also a heap, then one grain of sand is a heap

sentence used to emphasize lexical ambiguity and the importance of punctuation

problem of natural language processing; identifying which sense of a word (has multiple meanings) is used in a sentence

wording that is devised to be understood in two ways

In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting in the failure to define one's terms, or knowingly and deliberately using words in a different sense than the one the audience will understand.

A contronym or contranym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cling" or "to split apart". This feature is also called enantiosemy, enantionymy (enantio- means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic (having more than one meaning).

informal fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning

word that appears meaningful but is vague

optical illusion image which exploits graphical similarities between two or more distinct image forms

Ambiguity in Grammar

In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word "prime" is not vague since every number is definitively either prime or not. Vagueness is commonly diagnosed by a predicate's ability to give rise to the sorites paradox. Vagueness is separate from ambiguity, in which an expression has multiple denotations. For instance the word "bank" is ambiguous since it can refer either to a river bank or to a financial ins

grammatical construction occurring when two forms of negation are used in the same sentence

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 the use of an argot (ingroup language) of limited communicative value to outsiders.

sentences with structures permitting multiple possible interpretations

practice by a country of being intentionally ambiguous on certain aspects of its foreign policy

thumb|right|220px|The Divan of Hafez, a master of the art of īhām. [[National Museum of Iran, Tehran, Persia.]]

grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect

linguistic ambiguity caused by unusual stress

phrase used to reduce the intensity of something said, like "kinda" or "well, I've heard"

Latin phrase illustrating syntactic ambiguity

problem in computer programming

psychological construct that describes the relationship that individuals have with ambiguous stimuli or events

Synchysis is a rhetorical technique wherein words are intentionally scattered to create bewilderment, or for some other purpose. By disrupting the normal course of a sentence, it forces the audience to consider the meaning of the words and the relationship between them.