How Can One Word Mean Both Things? Sanction, Cleave, Dust, Left
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A handful of words carry two senses that directly contradict each other, and the reasons they got that way are different in almost every case.
What the category is
The words in question have two established senses that are opposites of one another, so that a sentence containing one may be ambiguous in a way that cannot be resolved from the word itself. To sanction something is to permit it or to penalise it. To cleave is to split apart or to cling together. To dust is to remove fine particles or to apply them. To overlook is to supervise or to fail to notice. In each case both senses are current and standard, which is what separates these from words that have simply changed meaning over time.
How they arise
Several different routes lead to the same result:
- •Two unrelated words happening to converge in spelling and sound
- •A single sense splitting as it is applied from different viewpoints
- •A verb formed from a noun that can mean adding or removing
- •A word acquiring an ironic sense that hardens into a literal one
- •Borrowing the same root twice from different languages
- •Technical use in one trade diverging from ordinary use
Where the viewpoint does the work
The most interesting cases are those where the two senses are the same event described from opposite ends, which explains several that otherwise look absurd. To rent is to give use of property for payment or to take it, depending on which side of the transaction you stand. Similar pairs include leasing, lending in some dialects and the verb for putting something up for sale. Left, meaning both departed and remaining, works the same way, since everybody who left is gone and everybody who is left remains. The word describes the event and the perspective supplies the rest.
The ones that are arguments in disguise
A few of these words are contested rather than merely ambiguous, and the argument is about usage rather than about meaning. The verb meaning to ignore a rule has acquired, through decades of misuse, a sense close to its opposite, and dictionaries now record both while a large number of people object to the newer one. The verb meaning to increase interest is regularly used to mean the reverse. In each case the pattern is the same, a word used loosely by many people for long enough that the loose sense becomes standard, which is exactly how most of the older examples arrived as well.
Why they cause less trouble than expected
A word with contradictory senses ought to be unusable and in practice is not, which says something about how language actually works. Context resolves nearly every instance before a listener notices the ambiguity exists, because the surrounding words, the grammar and the situation all constrain which sense is possible. Genuine ambiguity requires a sentence carefully constructed to permit both, which is why the examples in articles about the phenomenon are usually invented. The one place they do cause problems is in writing meant to be unambiguous across contexts, such as legislation and safety instructions, where careful drafters avoid them deliberately.
The takeaway
A few words carry two current and standard senses that contradict each other, arriving there by unrelated words converging, by a single sense splitting or by the same event being described from opposite ends of it. Context resolves almost every real instance before anybody notices, so genuine ambiguity requires a sentence built to produce it. Careful drafters avoid them in legislation and safety instructions.