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Multiple-Meaning Words

A multiple-meaning word is spelled and said the same way but means different things: a bat flies at night, and you hit a ball with a bat. Context is the only clue, which is why these words are such good reading practice.

Here are 120 multiple-meaning words from past ClueBy puzzles, each with a real example sentence for every meaning. Use them as a reference, or make a printable worksheet below.

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Students read each sentence and write the missing word. Every word appears in several sentences, each time with a different meaning.

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Multiple-Meaning Words

Name: ____________________Date: __________

Write the missing word in each sentence. Each word is used more than once, with a different meaning each time.

  1. Don't do anything ________________.
  2. She laid her head on my ________________ so she could listen to my heartbeat.
  3. Birch trees have smooth white ________________.
  4. Our dog starts to ________________ whenever the doorbell rings.
  5. The lid of the ________________ creaked open.
  6. When are we going to ________________?
  7. Buy me a box of chocolates and I'll be ________________.
  8. I had a bad ________________ and was in bed for a week.
  9. I felt an uncomfortable tightness in my ________________.
  10. The party suffered for the ________________ of party-switching.
  11. I had a ________________ with my boss today.
  12. The girl drawing a picture in the first ________________ is my niece.
  13. Algeria is a ________________ of gas and oil.
  14. The ________________ was stolen yesterday, along with the balls.
  15. I'm the one who owns all this ________________.
  16. The ________________ hangs upside down in the cave.
  17. I seem to be developing a ________________.
  18. The water is too ________________.
  19. Tom didn't even ________________ an eye.
  20. Its rival in the ________________ War, the Soviet Union, exploited this at the time.
  21. The sergeant loved to ________________ orders at us.
  22. We had to ________________ the boat across the lake.
  23. TikTok makes it very easy to create ________________.
  24. Check the label for the sugar ________________.

Sentences from ClueBy, Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR) and Common Voice (CC0). clueby.com

Answer key

  1. rash — hasty
  2. chest — of your body
  3. bark — of a tree
  4. bark — a dog's sound
  5. chest — a box
  6. land — to come down
  7. content — happy
  8. cold — an illness
  9. chest — of your body
  10. rash — a series
  11. row — a quarrel
  12. row — a line
  13. land — a country
  14. bat — for baseball
  15. land — ground
  16. bat — the animal
  17. rash — on the skin
  18. cold — not warm
  19. bat — in an idiom
  20. cold — the Cold War
  21. bark — to shout
  22. row — to paddle
  23. content — videos and posts
  24. content — the amount

Multiple-meaning words list

Tick up to 10 words to build a worksheet with just those words.

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Frequently asked questions

What are multiple-meaning words?

Words with the same spelling and pronunciation but more than one meaning, like bark (of a dog or of a tree) or bank (for money or of a river). You can only tell which meaning is meant from the rest of the sentence.

Are multiple-meaning words the same as homonyms?

Mostly, yes. Teachers often use "multiple-meaning words" and "homonyms" for the same idea. Homophones are different: they sound alike but are spelled differently, like flour and flower.

Are the worksheets free?

Yes. Make and print as many as you like for home or classroom use. Each sheet has its own link, so you can print the same one again.

Where do the words come from?

From past ClueBy puzzles, a daily game where you sort twelve sentences by their missing word. A new puzzle every day adds four more words to this list.

Sentences from ClueBy, Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR) and Common Voice (CC0). clueby.com