Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use ambiguity in a sentence

40 example sentences · noun

Ambiguity means the state of being ambiguous; the state of leaving room for more than one interpretation. Example: “His speech was made with such great ambiguity that neither supporter nor opponent could be certain of his true position.”

Examples of ambiguity by meaning

nounThe state of being ambiguous; the state of leaving room for more than one interpretation.

  • His speech was made with such great ambiguity that neither supporter nor opponent could be certain of his true position.

nounAn instance of this state: words or statements that are open to more than one interpretation, explanation or meaning...

  • For people who would rather face a plague of locusts than permit an avoidable ambiguity, this is like having their underwear twisted.2024, Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar, Polity Press, →ISBN, page 96

More sentences with ambiguity

  • When Stalinists spoke of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, they intentionally created ambiguity regarding reeducation versus murder.From the entry liquidation
  • The unintended ambiguity of the phrase was a double-edged sword: it spurred litigation but it also ended up shielding good-faith actors.From the entry double-edged sword
  • Deixis allows for economy of speech but may introduce ambiguity in recorded speech when referring to something physical.From the entry deixis
  • “Take a deep breath, accept the ambiguity, and trust God’s plan.2021 May 8, Melody Dixon, “Graduates strut the stage in 69th Commencement Ceremony”, in Coahoma Community College. From the entry put a dent in the universe
  • Patriarchal metagender does not allow for any ambiguity -- Woman and Man are the only available divisions.2009, Clare Beckett, Owen Heathcote, Marie Macey, Negotiating Boundaries? Identities, Sexualities, Diversities, →ISBN, page 48. From the entry metagender
  • The lack of ambiguity in how they are marshaled is another characteristic of blittable types.2006, Bruce Bukovics, .NET 2.0 Interoperability Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach. From the entry blittable
  • But its ambiguities are nevertheless helpful in making sense of those of the piano nocturne.2004, Halina Goldberg, editor, The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, Bloomington, Indianapolis, In.: Indiana University Press…. From the entry nocturne
  • It is theoretically possible that structural ambiguity could be filtered out of natural languages.2001, Mark Sainsbury, chapter 1, in Logical Forms — An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, 2nd edition, Blackwell Publishing, →ISBN, §12…. From the entry artificial language
  • This syntactic correctio (self-correction) is not so emphatic as to constitute full ambiguity.1998, Alastair Fowler, editor, Paradise Lost (Longman Annotated English Poets, Second Edition), →ISBN, page 17. From the entry correctio
  • He highlights the stylistic conceits and ambiguity that often turn quite ordinary statements into ponderous pedantics.1992, College Student Journal, page 86. From the entry pedantics
  • The language might be fraught with word ambiguity or sentence amphiboly.1987, Jeffrey Buechner, “Radically Misinterpreting Radical Interpretation,”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, volume 45…. From the entry amphiboly
  • But the denser ambiguity springs from the three baragouins, fantastical languages, that are interspersed among the others.1979, Alice Fiola Berry, Rabelais, Homo Logos (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures; 208), Chapel Hill, N.C.…. From the entry baragouin
  • Like the Kremlinology of the cold war, the unpacking of Nasrallah’s careful ambiguities is as much art as science.2024 January 7, “Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran … how far could war in the Middle East spread?”, in the Guardian. From the entry Kremlinology
  • More voices can lead to more ambiguity and more conflict.2023, Caroline Baker, Don Baker, “Cancel This! Influencers React to Cancel Culture and Deplatforming”, in An Influencer’s World: A…. From the entry uncancel
  • Perhaps even more problematically for the Patrochilles naysayers, is that this ambiguity throughout Homer's original epic is really not that ambiguous.2021, Amelia Koen, "An Olive Pit, A Lyre, A Fig", Honi Soit (University of Sydney), Week 8, Semester 2 (2021), page 19. From the entry Patrochilles
  • It is with this ambiguity in mind that one can begin a serious deconstructive, or doublehanded, reading of Levinas's work.2014, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, →ISBN, page 16. From the entry doublehanded
  • Mr Urkullu’s ambiguity contrasts with Mr Mas’s growing stridence.2012, The Economist, Regional elections in Spain: A Basque case. From the entry stridence
  • A graph based disambiguation algorithm is introduced to resolve the ambiguities such as synonyms and polynyms in place names.2010, Natarajan Meghanathan, Selma Boumerdassi, Nabendu Chaki, Recent Trends in Networks and Communications, →ISBN. From the entry polynym
  • Since there are potentially many different ways to carry out this analytic continuation process, there are questions of ambiguity and redundancy.2008, Steven G. Krantz, A Guide to Complex Variables, Mathematical Association of America, page 125. From the entry analytic continuation
  • But their depictions of Perseus are remarkably different and demonstrate the ambiguity of Medusa that was seeping into Victorian iconography.2001, Dennis Berthold, “Melville's Medusas”, in Sanford E. Marovitz, Athanasios C. Christodoulou, editors, Melville "Among the nations"…. From the entry medusa
  • To denote direction of the omnibearing line with respect to the VOR, a "to-from" ambiguity indicator is used.1995, Samuel B. Fishbein, Flight management systems: the evolution of avionics and navigation. From the entry omnibearing
  • Literary critic William Empson identified seven kinds of ambiguity.1990, Keith Henderson, "Creative ambiguity" (Review of A Canadian Challenge by Christian Dufour), The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 15 Dec, p.…. From the entry notwithstanding clause
  • “I never did either,” I replied, “but it seemed to hit the right combination of subliminal dignity and overt ambiguity.”1984 April 8, Leonard Koppett, “An ‘editor emeritus’ may yet produce a ‘pontificus maximus’”, in The Peninsula Times Tribune, page C-3…. From the entry emeritus
  • Because Plato allowed them to co-exist, the meaning and connotations of the one overlap those of the other, and ambiguities arise.1961, J. A. Philip, “Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato,”, in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, volume…. From the entry arise
  • We show that exploiting diverse information sources can alleviate ambiguities that arise from contextual use of underspecific referring expressions and unexpressed argument alternations of verbs.2016, Shiwali Mohan, Aaron Mininger, John Laird, “Towards an Indexical Model of Situated Language Comprehension for Cognitive Agents in…. From the entry underspecific
  • This is an evocation of the messy multiplicity and ambiguity of consumers and outsiders, in the warm chaosmos and on the far fringes of Birdland.2014, Douglas Brownlie, Paul Hewer, Mark Tadajewski, Expanding Disciplinary Space: On the Potential of Critical Marketing, →ISBN. From the entry chaosmos
  • This increasing ambiguity fits in with Beckett's strategy to ‘vaguen’ his text, as Rosemary Pountney has demonstrated with reference to the theatre.2011, Dirk van Hulle, “The Genesis of Beckett’s Last Works”, in The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Stirrings Still/Soubresauts and Comment…. From the entry vaguen
  • One can see why logicians might prefer artificial languages: they are constructed from the ground up in such a way that structural ambiguity is impossible.2001, Mark Sainsbury, chapter 1, in Logical Forms — An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, 2nd edition, Blackwell Publishing, →ISBN, §12…. From the entry artificial language
  • Despite the inherent ambiguities of the process, QTL mapping (Sections IV and V) will provide vital information for basic and applied aspects of crop improvement.1995, Michael Lee, “DNA Markers and Plant Breeding Programs”, in Advances in Agronomy, volume 55, San Diego, CA: Academic Press, →DOI…. From the entry pangenomic
  • Whereas the complexifiers emphasize tolerance of ambiguity, contradiction, and change as critical ingredients for good judgment, the fundamentalists take a starkly different approach.1992 September, Philip E. Tetlock, “Good Judgment in International Politics: Three Psychological Perspectives”, in Political Psychology…. From the entry complexifier
  • The press took seriously all Shaw's provocative ambiguities and clownings, and Lady Astor was identified with his most outrageous actions and statements.1961, Lucille Iremonger, And his charming lady, page 205. From the entry clowning
  • Under-punctuation (which is fashionable to-day) throws a great deal of the burden of interpretation on the reader, and sometimes leaves him with obscurities and ambiguities.1957, George Henry Vallins, “Points of Punctuation”, in Good English: How to Write It, London: Pan Books Ltd., page 112. From the entry under-punctuation
  • Claire Fontaine (who are actually a duo) have queered the phrase, lending its pungency and ambiguity to a biennale that I wish were nearly so succinct.2024 April 22, Adrian Searle, “Venice Biennale 2024 review – everything everywhere all at once”, in The Guardian, →ISSN. From the entry longueur
  • Seen in this light, Ruhr is a digital film that posits documentary uncertainty as its principle as Benning's digital micromanipulations create the temporal ambiguity of the durational image.2022, Jihoon Kim, Documentary's Expanded Fields. From the entry micromanipulation
  • The misagreement in number (singular vs. plural) between subject and verb is caused by subject number ambiguity, either intrinsic (the subject itself) or extrinsic (the effect of subject modification).2020 "Good Writing Practice: Grammatical misagreement in number," Medical Writing, 29(3): 98-99 (Sept. 2020). From the entry misagreement
  • As long as not all people have fluency or near-native knowledge in all languages and cultures, translation cannot be avoided, and, thus, one must accept at least some ambiguity.2015, Bettina Koch, Patterns Legitimizing Political Violence in Transcultural Perspectives. Islamic and Christian Traditions and Legacies…. From the entry near-native
  • Kusama herself, delighted by her escalating auction prices but paranoid about the least implication of indebtedness to any other artist, has retreated ever further into gurulike ambiguities.2009 March 3, “Kusama Dot Com”, in New York Times. From the entry gurulike
  • Curiously, in the course of speculating on the details of the connection, Kidd associates the 'quam multa?' group with ambiguity, yet seems to identify them with cases of polynymy.2007, Catherine Atherton, The Stoics on Ambiguity, →ISBN, page 475. From the entry polynymy

Meaning of ambiguity

  1. noun The state of being ambiguous; the state of leaving room for more than one interpretation.
  2. noun An instance of this state: words or statements that are open to more than one interpretation, explanation or meaning, especially if that meaning cannot be determined from the context.

Full definition of ambiguity

Questions about ambiguity in a sentence

How do you use ambiguity in a sentence?
Ambiguity is used as a noun. For example: “His speech was made with such great ambiguity that neither supporter nor opponent could be certain of his true position.”
What is a short sentence with ambiguity?
“Literary critic William Empson identified seven kinds of ambiguity.”
What does ambiguity mean?
Ambiguity means the state of being ambiguous; the state of leaving room for more than one interpretation.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ambiguity (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this page: “How to use ambiguity in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/ambiguity. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.