double meaning

plural double meanings

1. The situation in which a word or phrase has two different, often opposite, meanings. For example, wicked can mean both "good" and "bad".
2. A deliberate construction that plays on two separate meanings of a word or words; a pun.

   It is important to note that connotation is different from an unambiguous “double meaning” or “pun.” With a pun both meanings have to be lexically current but with connotation it is the multiple, even ambiguous, associations of each word that are important.)

   2011, Patrick Spedding, James Lambert, “Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy”, in Studies in Philology, volume 108, number 1, page 118