Q: I’ve been working on a project where one thing we’re looking at is “disambiguity.” But when I try looking up this word, not many results come back, preferring “unambiguity.” Should I worry about these prefixes?
A: The noun “disambiguity” has been around since at least the mid-20th century, but it hasn’t become common enough to make it into standard dictionaries or even the online Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference with over a half-million entries.
The earliest example we’ve found is from “The Dethronement of Queen Anne,” an article by C. G. Burke about the cult of high fidelity, published in the Saturday Review of Literature (June 24, 1950).
In this passage, Burke describes how a novice audiophile modifies a hi-fi system in a Queen Anne-style cabinet, comparing the before and after versions with the low-key Queen Anne of Great Britain and the assertive Catherine the Great of Russia:
“Queen Anne immediately discoursed with the flamboyant robustious disambiguity of the great Catherine, and our neophyte listened to cosmic intonations in a daze of wonderment for weeks.”
As we’ve said, some English speakers do use “disambiguity” as a noun meaning the removal of ambiguity. But it barely registers when compared with the standard English terms “disambiguation” and “unambiguity” on Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks terms in digitized books.
Although standard dictionaries don’t recognize “disambiguity,” the collaborative dictionary Wiktionary defines it as a “lack of ambiguity” or “disambiguation.”
If you want to use the term and feel your readers will understand it, go ahead. The editors at the Saturday Review accepted it, apparently assuming their readers would understand.
If enough people use “disambiguity,” it will become standard one day. Ultimately, the users of English are the ones who decide what’s standard. That’s how language evolves.
As for the etymology, all these disambiguating words are derived from the noun “ambiguity,” which ultimately comes from the classical Latin ambiguitas, the ability to be understood in two or more ways.
The earliest English citation for “ambiguity” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an early 14th-century entry in A Middle English Statute-Book (2012), edited by Claire Fennell:
“Ase fram nou forthward, suuch ambiguete sal ben forsmiten ant beo in certein” (“As from now forward, such ambiguity shall be struck down and become certain”).
When the adjective “ambiguous” showed up in the late 15th century, the OED says, it referred to language “having different possible meanings” or “open to more than one interpretation.”
The dictionary’s earliest citation is from John Skelton’s English translation (circa 1487) of Bibliotheca Historica, a 40-volume history written by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) in the first century BC:
“He ansuerde vnder this forme derkely intryked with ambiguouse sence” (“He answered in this vaguely intricate way with ambiguous sense”).
The words here with a “dis-” prefix are relative newcomers. The oldest of them, the noun “disambiguation,” appeared in the early 19th century, according to the OED. The prefix here means “in a different direction”—that is, away from ambiguity.
Oxford defines the noun this way: “The removal of ambiguity (esp. in language); clarification; differentiation. Also: the result of this; the action or fact of telling things apart; discrimination; interpretation.”
The first citation is from Outline of a New System of Logic (1827), by George Bentham: “Disambiguation—where it is to fix the sense of an ambiguous term. This operation has been termed distinction by some Logicians.” (Bentham, a nephew of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was a distinguished botanist as well as a pioneer in abstract logical science.)
Readers of the blog may be familiar with Wikipedia‘s “disambiguation” page, which defines the term as “the process of resolving conflicts that arise when a potential article title is ambiguous, most often because it refers to more than one subject covered by Wikipedia.”
The OED says the verb “disambiguate” appeared in the mid-20th century, meaning to “make (something) unambiguous; to render more easily distinguished or differentiated from something else.”
The first example cited is from a paper in the Journal of Philosophy, “What Do You Mean?” by Jerry A. Fodorthe (July 21, 1960): “One disambiguates an utterance by adding to the context of the utterance.”
We’ll end with the OED’s only “unambiguity” citation, which struck us as ambiguous. We’ve disambiguated it by expanding the passage, which comes from a June 24, 1842, entry in Provincial Letters (1844), by the Anglican clergyman George Stanley Faber:
“Its unambiguity is the more fully established, because the language is not that of a single individual but of many individuals who all apparently say the same thing in their own respectively different words.”
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