Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Word of the Day....









...is disambiguation. I had occasion to type the word "death" into Google (which is a story in itself) and the second hit returned was a wikipedia entry titled "Death: (disambiguation)."

Apparently wikipedia labels an entry as "disambiguation" when there are two entries for two distinct definitions of the same term. It is, as they put it, "the process of identifying which sense of a word (i.e. meaning) is used in any given sentence, when the word has a number of distinct senses." It's a tool used in something called computational linguistics, which is well beyond my puny powers. My daughter would understand.

If ambiguate is a verb meaning to make something ambigous, then disambiguate means to remove ambiguity. Here's what I know: there's nothing less ambiguous than death.

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