People here are having words about words.
“Mole” is a good one, because it has multiple meanings with completely different etymologies. I think that a skin blemish and an Avogadro’s number quantity both derive from a word meaning “mass”, but the burrowing mammal and the Mexican sauce are both unrelated to those and to each other.
And both are unrelated to a catholic service.
…and a unit of measurement in Chemistry
Yup, that’s the “Avogadro’s number quantity”.
Fire means both flame, and to shoot a missile weapon. An interesting aspect of this is that characters in fantasy stories that talk about “firing arrows” are speaking anachronistically, since the use of “fire” to mean shooting at things is derived from firearms. They’d have used “loose” or shoot" in real history.
Phase is interesting in that while it means “stage in a process”, “different forms of matter” and “a type of electrical waveform”, it’s also in the last few decades acquired the meaning of “go through solid objects like a ghost”. No one seems sure where it started, early examples range from Kitty Pryde of the X-Men “phasing” though walls, to Dungeons and Dragons’ Phase Door spell.
My first grade teacher used to always threaten to make us copy the dictionary entry for “run” as punishment, because that word has so many definitions. You can run in a race. Or you can run a business. Or run for office. Or my fridge runs. Paint runs. And I’m sure I’ve left out a bunch, but I have run out of motivation to list them.
Xerox and xerox, Google and google are examples of proper names that have evolved a second meaning as generic verbs.
“I used Google to google ‘google’.”
Cleave – to split, or to cling tightly to
You got there right before me. But it is really two separate words with distinct etymologies, histories and conjugations. Cleave, cleft, and either cleft (palate) or cloven (hoof) is to take apart, while cleave, cleaved, cleaved is to bring together.
Somewhere on an old dead computer, I have a list of over 100 pairs of words with the same spelling but different pronunciation and meaning. One of the most interesting is unionized. You can’t even say what indefinite article it takes. A unionized factory vs. an unionized solution.
I didn’t see this one, compress.
Which leads to the question: What would happen if you had a mole of moles, as in 6.022*10^23 small burrowing mammals? Thankfully, XKCD’s What If has the answer.
What would we do without XKCD?