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verb

disambiguate

to clarify something that is ambiguous or open to multiple interpretations

In a sentence

Six example sentences with disambiguate, each labelled with its topic.

  • The parser cannot disambiguate the query on its own, so the app asks whether you meant the city or the band.

    Technology

  • Courts spent a decade trying to disambiguate the phrase, since one reading covered only vehicles and another covered bicycles too.

    Law

  • Seminars often stall until someone disambiguates the word freedom, separating absence of chains from having any real choice.

    Philosophy

  • Taxonomists disambiguate species with the same common name by citing the Latin binomial in every paper.

    Science

  • Footnotes disambiguate the poem's references, since a reader today may not know which war the poet meant.

    Literature

  • A blood test disambiguates the two conditions, which share nearly identical symptoms for the first week.

    Medicine

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