Disambiguation refers to the removal of ambiguity by making something clear. Disambiguation narrows down the meaning of words and it’s a good thing. This word makes sense if you break it down. Dis means “not,” ambiguous means “unclear,” and the ending -tion makes it a noun. https://www.vocabulary. com/dictionary/disambiguation
I ran across this word while doing a Google search for “Age of Enlightenment”. Wikipedia has a link to “Age of Reason (Disambiguation)” here. It appears that “Age of Reason” is a term uses to refer to the “Age of Enlightenment”, but Wikipedia has “disambiguated” it, because the term “Age of Reason” got there first.
Obviously, to fully appreciate the purpose of this transformation of terminology, I needed to know what “disambiguation” meant. It is defined above, and for a moment made me pause. Upon doing a little more searching of the Wikipedia site, it appears that in its effort to strip ambiguity from related terms and terminologies, it has created, or searched for, less ambiguous ones that are close to the same thing. (Don’t ask me why they didn’t show “Agent of Reason”, with a link saying, “See, Age of Enlightenment”.)
But then I began to wonder why there was a need to create a word that is ambiguous in itself (yes, if I had to look it up, it’s “ambiguous” … I carried vocabulary flash cards with me as a kid, so there!) “Disambiguation” was a new one on me – no flash cards for that. Come to think of it, are there such things as vocabulary flash cards today? Probably not. Facebook, and its progency, is all a millenial needs today to be successful and erudite [look it up….]
So it seems we’ve come full circle in this irony, creating an ambiguous word to explain the process of taking ambiguity out of other words. I mean, it’s not like the English language had not already created antonyms for ambiguity. What about words such as “unambiguous”? “clarity” “clarification”, etc?
To preface a negative term such as “ambiguous” which means something is generally capable of more than one definition, with the prefix “dis” (i.e. “not”) results in a sort of double negative. For example, which sentence makes more sense?
- This term is not capable of having more than a single definition, or
- This term has a single definition.
To put an end to this craziness, one would think that a quick check into the etymology of the word “disambiguation” would give us a clue to where it came from. Perhaps ancient Greek, Roman, Old English, Middle English, German, etc., etc.? Not so fast. There is nothing. Metaphorically speaking, this word is a cipher, the bastard child of two lonely wordsmiths who decided that they needed to bring a new word into the world to take the ambiguity out of “ambiguity”. This unholy alliance resulted in adding “dis” to the front of the linguistic creature, and “tion” to its backside. Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t be prouder. ~PCQ
