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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
ambiguous
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
an ambiguous/vague concept (=one that is not clear or is hard to define)
▪ Creativity is an ambiguous concept.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
highly
▪ It is either tautologous, positively dangerous, unoriginal or highly ambiguous.
▪ The main problem with constructing such a map is that there are circumstances in which the map is highly ambiguous.
▪ But words have a highly ambiguous status: they are human artefacts but they are also very like natural species.
more
▪ In this there is a much more ambiguous and open positioning of the subject.
▪ His South Dakota activities are more ambiguous.
▪ The gains to be made in the political sphere are, as Chapter S will show, more ambiguous and contradictory.
▪ Socially, the impact has been more ambiguous.
▪ Over-generation &038; Syntactic Ambiguity Sentences are much more ambiguous than one would normally expect.
▪ Some verbs are more ambiguous than others.
▪ Human nature and human achievements have come to appear far more ambiguous than the progressive hopes of the nineteenth century admitted.
▪ Another, far more ambiguous and strange way, can be found in Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy.
somewhat
▪ As is well known, Marx himself gave a somewhat ambiguous answer; but Poulantzas' reply is quite clear.
▪ For many years teachers had occupied a somewhat ambiguous position.
▪ The excavations revealed somewhat ambiguous structural evidence for a furnace with the discovery of a firing trench.
▪ And its faxed decision seemed somewhat ambiguous.
▪ Government policies have been somewhat ambiguous.
■ NOUN
position
▪ I was in an ambiguous position.
▪ For many years teachers had occupied a somewhat ambiguous position.
▪ The Labour Party remained in an ambiguous position.
▪ The critic Greenberg acknowledged the ambiguous position the avant-garde would need to maintain with its patrons.
▪ Feminists are more aware of this ambiguity than psychologists are of their similarly ambiguous position.
▪ Single women and there were many among the repealers-occupied a more ambiguous position.
word
▪ Equally, you might use ambiguous words which your superiors treat as a resignation which they will not allow you to retract.
▪ The second manner of semantic variation concerns the activation by different contexts of different senses associated with ambiguous word forms.
▪ The problem is not just one of poor acoustic input but also of ambiguous word boundaries.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ an ambiguous question
▪ McClane's position in the company is ambiguous.
▪ She left a very ambiguous message on the answerphone last night.
▪ The document's ambiguous wording makes it very difficult to follow.
▪ The last part of her letter was deliberately ambiguous.
▪ The results of the experiments were ambiguous and they will have to be done again.
▪ Unfortunately the instructions were ambiguous and we didn't know which part of the program to run.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He liked to keep the story of his life ambiguous.
▪ In the first place, most of its key concepts are essentially ambiguous.
▪ Le Touquet's identity today is a little ambiguous but it still has a nice feel about it.
▪ Like a true oracle, Hailey's pronouncements were both authoritative and ambiguous.
▪ Mitterrand had ambiguous relations with money, the power of which he regularly lambasted.
▪ The Labour Party remained in an ambiguous position.
▪ Where Tudor is economical, organic and disciplined, Stevenson is fussy, distracted and ambiguous.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Ambiguous

Ambiguous \Am*big"u*ous\, a. [L. ambiguus, fr. ambigere to wander about, waver; amb- + agere to drive.] Doubtful or uncertain, particularly in respect to signification; capable of being understood in either of two or more possible senses; equivocal; as, an ambiguous course; an ambiguous expression.

What have been thy answers? What but dark, Ambiguous, and with double sense deluding?
--Milton.

Syn: Doubtful; dubious; uncertain; unsettled; indistinct; indeterminate; indefinite. See Equivocal.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
ambiguous

1520s, from Latin ambiguus "having double meaning, shifting, changeable, doubtful," adjective derived from ambigere "to dispute about," literally "to wander," from ambi- "about" (see ambi-) + agere "drive, lead, act" (see act). Sir Thomas More (1528) seems to have first used it in English, but ambiguity dates back to c.1400. Related: Ambiguously; ambiguousness.

Wiktionary
ambiguous

a. 1 Open to multiple interpretations. 2 vague and unclear. 3 (context obsolete of persons English) hesitant; uncertain; not taking sides.

WordNet
ambiguous
  1. adj. open to two or more interpretations; or of uncertain nature or significance; or (often) intended to mislead; "an equivocal statement"; "the polling had a complex and equivocal (or ambiguous) message for potential female candidates"; "the officer's equivocal behavior increased the victim's uneasiness"; "popularity is an equivocal crown"; "an equivocal response to an embarrassing question" [syn: equivocal] [ant: unequivocal]

  2. having more than one possible meaning; "ambiguous words"; "frustrated by ambiguous instructions, the parents were unable to assemble the toy" [ant: unambiguous]

  3. having no intrinsic or objective meaning; not organized in conventional patterns; "an ambiguous situation with no frame of reference"; "ambiguous inkblots"

Wikipedia
Ambiguous (film)

aka and is a 2003 Japanese Pink film directed by Toshiya Ueno. It was chosen as Best Film of the year at the Pink Grand Prix ceremony.

Usage examples of "ambiguous".

An ambiguous passage of Theophanes persuaded the annalist of the church that death was the immediate consequence of this barbarous execution.

The sidewalk was filled with anorectic individuals of ambiguous gender, hugging guitar cases as if they were life preservers, dragging deeply on cigarettes and regarding the passing traffic with spaced-out apprehension.

He held his deactivated saber one-handed, low in an ambiguous stance, not quite attack ready.

Of course he pumps her for information about Joy Hall, but Mealy remains determinedly ignorant about everything that she finds unimportant -- which is almost everything unconnected with cock -- and when she does impart information, it is usually couched in the most ambiguous terms.

After the second or third ambiguous question, Huron looked up from the playing board with a smile that sent a sudden jolt through her heart.

If he knocks it is usually only to make his presence known to the slave, and the knock is commonly authoritative and rude, often startling her, even though she expects it, signaling her in no unclear or ambiguous fashion that she is to prepare herself, and well, to greet him, her master, which she does then in a position of docility and submission, usually kneeling and head down.

The very concept of a liberatory national sovereignty is ambiguous ifnot completely contradictory.

After assuring her that I no longer entertained any doubt of her innocence, I told her that I thought the behaviour of her friend very ambiguous.

They developed a little gray matter, the neopallium, to deal with the elusive and ambiguous information that smells provide.

And again, there is the desire to compress a telegraphic message into the minimum sixpennyworth, and so send an ambiguous and cryptic sentence, when sevenpence would have made it as clear as light.

Before the end of the siege, an act of blood, ambiguous and indiscreet, sullied the fair fame of Belisarius.

The cloth, Lewisham observed, as he turned towards it, had several undarned holes and discoloured places, and in the centre stood a tarnished cruet which contained mustard, pepper, vinegar, and three ambiguous dried-up bottles.

Every day he picked someone new to represent her, some figure seen at a distance, sexually ambiguous, half-visible in the violent uplight from the concrete.

Several councils were held, confutations were published, excommunications were pronounced, ambiguous explanations were by turns accepted and refused, treaties were concluded and violated, and at length Paul of Samosata was degraded from his episcopal character, by the sentence of seventy or eighty bishops, who assembled for that purpose at Antioch, and who, without consulting the rights of the clergy or people, appointed a successor by their own authority.

This notion of anthropological exodus is still very ambiguous, however, because its methods, hybridization and mutation, are themselves the very methods employed by imperial sovereignty.