I saw “belligerent” as another meaning. And of course there’s also “shop where chips are sold”
I think we have a contender in the “most disparate meanings for one word” stakes
I don’t think that’s right. The general Arabic word for “camel” is “jamal”, which in the Egyptian dialect is pronounced more like “gamal” with a hard “g”, from which English gets the word camel. Arabic does have a lot of more specific words for specific categories of camel, just as English does for horses (stallion, mare, colt, nag, etc.). It may well be that a native Arabic-speaker who is a “camel person” would pretty much always use more specific terms, but all of my native Arabic speaking instructors just said “jamal” and didn’t bother with any other more specific terms.
ETA: “jamal” can mean specifically a male camel, but it’s also used by at least some native speakers as the generic collective noun.
Oh, sure, I agree it’s a legit name. Might be the tool with the most, actually.
It isn’t really, that’s more-or-less confined to that ad series and 3-yo kids.
A chippy is a fish-and-chips shop - or possibly a bimbo, but not, here, a carpenter.
Hot summer days aren’t really a thing here, either.
The Americans around me all operate on the “they’re all spatulas” system, which drives me slightly nuts. In Norwegian one is, etymologically speaking, a “pot licker” and the other is a “frying spade”.
And of course while thinking of this post I had a terrifying five minutes being unable to recall one of these words. I need this pandemic to end so I can go back for a visit!
“All Spatulas Matter” is us.
Not “things” but if I say I’m going to run to the store I usually mean I’m going to drive. If I’m playing basketball and say I’m going to drive I usually mean I’m going to run.
You hear this use a lot during sports broadcasts, NFL in particular. Often, it’s when one team has a large lead over the other with little hope for the losing side. The hits get a little harder, the post-play words get a little stronger, tempers get a little shorter. It doesn’t rise to penalties or fighting. “It’s getting chippy out there.”
And the interesting thing is that trunks are called trunks because they started out as an actual trunk strapped to the back of the vehicle. Boot originates from horse drawn carriages, which I didn’t know until I looked it up.
Over here “chippy”, when used to describe someone - “He’s a bit chippy.” - means over-sensitive, as in someone with a chip on their shoulder.
I love this.
In many Spanish dialects, such as the Castilian Spanish taught in schools, a “torta” is a cake. However, in Mexican Spanish, the kind you’re most likely to encounter in a restaurant in California, a torta is a particular kind of sandwich.
Getting back to English, what about nails? The kind on your fingertips vs. the kind you pound with a hammer. Actually I suppose you could whack either one with a hammer, and many do, just not usually on purpose.
Where I live this is a carriage. And this is a carriage. And this this is a carriage. All without any modifier 90% of the time.
I cannot recall even once being confused as to which someone meant, let alone guessing incorrectly.
Shakes head
There are an absolutely ludicrous number of different varietals of pea, and of bean, and they are each rather different from the others. Green beans alone may be Kentucky Wonders or Tennessee Flats, the former being a pole bean and the latter being a bunch bean. Of the bigger kind of which you don’t normally eat their shell casing, you’ve got your pinto and your black, your kidney and your navy, and many many more, including lima beans and butter beans. And while it is true that if you let a Kentucky Wonder stay on the climbing vine long enough, the outer shellhusk will get coarser and the beans inside get bigger, it is not true that you’re ever likely to find huge honking Kentucky Wonders being sold as if they were lima beans or kidney beans. It’s not what they’re grown for. And vice versa. Don’t even get me started on peas. I could list a dozen or so without even mentioning the silly little green English pea that graces the jolly Green Giant can. Snap peas and crowder peas and sugar peas and purple-hull peas and blackeyed peas and speckled peas and so on and so forth.
Know thy legumes.
Ummm…
Has anyone realized yet that this is so common in English that we have the word “homonym” to describe the phenomenon?
I don’t know why you included that because I knew all that and moments of its contradicts what I said. A green bean is called a “green bean” because it is literally a “green” “bean.” And a green string bean and a black bean, as mentioned above, are both from cultivars of the same species of plant. So they are not “a different animal altogether.”
What we are talking about is restricted than than just homonyms - there are many , many words that are homonyms and can’t be described as “different things that have the same name”. For example “season” meaning the time of the year might be described as a “thing” but “season” meaning to apply seasonings to a food clearly isn’t a thing.
Where I live Coke can mean either a soft drink of any brand or the specific product. A conversation could be;
What do you want to drink?
I’d like a Coke. (meaning a soft drink)
Okay, do you want Coke or Mountain Dew?
And a lot of times those pavers are called cobblestones even though they are not at all. Cobblestones are large rounded river pebbles. Pavers are cut or molded blocks with flat sides.
Around here #1 and #3 are carriages, but #2 is a shopping cart. And a less fancy #3 would probably be called a buggy; while #1 is commonly specified as ‘baby carriage’.
– What if spelled out in full is a “caterpillar tractor” is commonly just called a “cat”. I’ve occasionally been momentarily taken aback by a sentence before I figured out that was the kind of cat being talked about; but in general the context makes it quite clear.