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What is the word that describes the type of sentences that usually requires people to re-read the sentence so it makes sense?

Example: "The old house the young man"

The above example seems like, at first read, "the old house" and "the young man" as two separate nouns (with an adjective in front).

However, it can be parsed as "The old people house (gave lodging to) the young man"

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  • You will find more than you may want to know about homonyms, homophones and homographs in this previous ELU posting.
    – Rob_Ster
    Commented Dec 3, 2017 at 23:02
  • None of the answers appear to fit the word I am looking for
    – qcuyvffh
    Commented Dec 3, 2017 at 23:04
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    The example sentence is confusing because the noun "house" and the verb "house" are homographs. If you need a single word for a sentence that will trip up a reader, try "ambiguous," or merely "bad."
    – Rob_Ster
    Commented Dec 3, 2017 at 23:07

2 Answers 2

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It’s called a garden path sentence.

Allow me to quote Wiki:

A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced.

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  • An interesting addition to the list of ways to malign a sentence! +1
    – Rob_Ster
    Commented Dec 3, 2017 at 23:09
  • So a garden path sentence is hardly garden variety.
    – Kaz
    Commented Dec 4, 2017 at 22:57
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I agree with Alastair Lloyd's answer, but I would be remiss if I didn't also add "Crash Blossoms" as a term to mean the same thing.

Tom Scott has a YouTube video from his linguistics series on garden path sentences called "Crash Blossoms and Being Drunk: Ambiguity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldT2g2qDQNQ

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  • A crash blossom, however, is archetypically a headline rather than a sentence.
    – choster
    Commented Dec 4, 2017 at 19:01
  • It also seems that crash blossoms have two valid parses, and the unintended one is typically humorous (that's why it's a "blossom" -- we enjoy it like a flower).
    – Barmar
    Commented Dec 4, 2017 at 19:33

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