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ambiguousness

   Also found in: Medical, Legal, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.01 sec.
am·big·u·ous  (m-bgy-s)
adj.
1. Open to more than one interpretation: an ambiguous reply.
2. Doubtful or uncertain: "The theatrical status of her frequently derided but constantly revived plays remained ambiguous" (Frank Rich).

[From Latin ambiguus, uncertain, from ambigere, to go about : amb-, ambi-, around; see ambi- + agere, to drive; see ag- in Indo-European roots.]

am·bigu·ous·ly adv.
am·bigu·ous·ness n.
Synonyms: ambiguous, equivocal, obscure, recondite, abstruse, vague, cryptic, enigmatic
These adjectives mean lacking clarity of meaning. Ambiguous indicates the presence of two or more possible meanings: Frustrated by ambiguous instructions, I was unable to assemble the toy.
Something equivocal is unclear or misleading: "The polling had a complex and equivocal message for potential female candidates" (David S. Broder).
Obscure implies lack of clarity of expression: Some say that Blake's style is obscure and complex.
Recondite and abstruse connote the erudite obscurity of the scholar: "some recondite problem in historiography" (Walter Laqueur). The students avoided the professor's abstruse lectures.
What is vague is expressed in indefinite form or reflects imprecision of thought: "Vague . . . forms of speech . . . have so long passed for mysteries of science" (John Locke).
Cryptic suggests a sometimes deliberately puzzling terseness: The new insurance policy is full of cryptic terms.
Something enigmatic is mysterious and puzzling: The biography struggles to make sense of the artist's enigmatic life.
Translations
ambiguousness [æmˈbɪgjʊəsnɪs] Nambigüedad f
ambiguousness
nZwei- or Doppeldeutigkeit f; (= with many possible meanings)Mehr- or Vieldeutigkeit f


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It is, needless to say, a zone of sexual ambiguousness, but more importantly, it is a term that gave Barthes room to figure forth his entropic desire that noisy meaningfulness cease its hectoring and diminuendo back into a whisper of the banal and the imprecise and the uninterpretable.
The ambiguousness in the use of the word operation is apparent from the terms operational functions and operations of war.
Though the two women's racial ambiguousness takes on different forms relative to the white men in their lives (Clare lies to her husband and "passes" for white while Pan lives in Chinatown as a biracial woman), both women's surroundings color the men's perceptions of them.
 
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