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If you think english is bad, you should see the horrendous amount of homophones in languages like Chinese or Japanese. A word like Ma can mean 25 things, though thankfully it can be divided another 5 by "tone" so only 5 of each. Still, everything is context-based. Though I haven't gotten far enough into Chinese yet to fully grasp all the workings, I know that Japanese at least, which uses the Chinese alphabet/characters, has a ridiculous amount of meanings for words.
"Konnichi (wa)" for example, can also be read "Kyoo" (depending on context, so impossible to tell just by seeing it individually), or independently as many other things.
Within english... Isn't relay like that? In my mind, "I will relay the information" sounds different than "I will run in a relay race". Similar to a 'desert' and the action-form of 'desert' or 'deserting' or perhaps "read": I will read, I have read. red vs read.
It's an interesting thing to consider, for sure.
(just reading my post, I remembered "lead" is an obvious complement to the way "read" works)
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