Word.ws English Dictionary

ambiguate

ambiguate verb: to make more ambiguous.

Verb

ambiguate (third-person singular simple present ambiguates, present participle ambiguating, simple past and past participle ambiguated)

  1. (transitive) To make more ambiguous.
    • Marvell is as careful here to ambiguate the nature of his poem's speaker as he was in presenting the 'forward youth' of the 'Horatian Ode'.1993, Thomas N. Corns, The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell
    • Devlin's writings had fragmented the conservative position by conflating harm and morality, and had significantly ambiguated the conception of harm at the heart of the debate.2001, Bernard E. Harcourt, chapter 7, in Illusion of Order
    Synonyms:
    complicate, confuse

Synonyms of ambiguate

Antonyms

Forms of ambiguate

third-person singular presentambiguates
present participleambiguating
past participleambiguated
pastambiguated

Origin of ambiguate

Stem of ambiguous (Latin ambiguus) + -ate.

Words formed from ambiguate

Questions about ambiguate

What does ambiguate mean?
Ambiguate means to make more ambiguous.
What part of speech is ambiguate?
Ambiguate is a verb.
What is the past tense of ambiguate?
The past tense of ambiguate is ambiguated.

Words near ambiguate in the dictionary

  1. ambigenous
  2. ambigram
  3. ambigrammatic
  4. ambigrams
  5. ambigu
  6. ambiguate
  7. ambiguated
  8. ambiguates
  9. ambiguating
  10. ambiguation
  11. ambiguations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ambiguate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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