Lexical ambiguities are when a single word can have two or more meanings. In English, you can find such lexical ambiguities in words like “saw” and “tongue”. “Saw” can either mean cutting something with a saw or the past tense of the verb “see”. The word “tongue” can either mean the human body part or a word for language. Therefore, you can have a sentence for “I saw wolves” and “You have a beautiful tongue” with two completely different meanings. Some can be quite odd, but still make complete sense. English isn’t the only language to have lexical ambiguities, in fact, all human languages are ambiguous on different levels. Being a native Russian speaker myself, I have decided to focus my topic on explaining some of the lexical ambiguities that can be found in the Russian language. There are some very interesting ambiguous words in Russian that I will be discussing and how to go about them in different scenarios, situations, events, etc. One of these examples will be discussing words like “arm” and “hand” which has the same word for both body parts. A sentence you might get is, “My рука (ruka) hurts!”. The catch is, how would you distinguish the two apart in a situation like this one? Is it the arm that hurts? Or the hand?

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