ambiguously

adv

ambiguously

adv

/æmˈbɪɡ.ju.əs.li/

Etymology From ambiguous + -ly.

1

In an ambiguous manner.

  • "The Stranger" was a dark, comely, youthful man's head, portentously looking out of a dark, shaded ground, and ambiguously smiling.1852 July, Herman Melville, “Book XXVI. A Walk; a Foreign Portrait; a Sail. And the End.”, in Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC, section I, page 479:
  • The bisexual name, such as Marion and Carol (and Evelyn and Vivian in England), is frequently a source of annoyance and embarrassment to the letter writer, who, if he does not know his ambiguously named correspondent personally […]1947, Louise Pound, Kemp Malone, Arthur Garfield Kennedy, William Cabell Greet, American Speech:
1 more example
  • Such has always been the case: from the vamptastic and scantily clad Theda Bara as Cleopatra (1917) to the milk bath, gold chains, and lesbian dancing of Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross (1932) to the homoerotic bath of Crassus in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), antiquity has provided an ambiguously liberated outlet for exploring contemporary fascinations – regardless of their historicity.2015, Alex McAuley, “16 Gateways to Vice: Drugs and Sex in Rome”, in Monica Cyrino, editor, Rome Season Two: Trial and Triumph, unnumbered page:
Derived terms
nonambiguously

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.