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The definition says:

To transport by teleportation.

But what's not clear is if "teleport anywhere in the world" means "teleport from anywhere" or "teleport to anywhere" or "teleport to anywhere from anywhere".

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    to travel anywhere in the world, to drive anywhere in the country
    – Lambie
    Commented Nov 24, 2019 at 18:32
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    Can you tell us the source of your defintion?
    – James K
    Commented Nov 24, 2019 at 19:28
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    @blackbird, it is exactly the same as the word, say, "jump". If I say "you can jump anywhere" it is ambiguous. (You can jump 'to' anywhere from where our discussion is taking place, or you can "do a jump" at any point. It's absolutely the norm in English that sentences are ambiguous. Something like 90% of sentences in English are ambiguous, it's the normal situation.
    – Fattie
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 13:24
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    The meaning in context would depend on the context. If you have come across this somewhere, you could show the passage this is quoted from. Most likely it means "to anywhere," but the context might make us more certain of that or tell us it means something else.
    – David K
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 13:49
  • teleport to anywhere.
    – voices
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 0:48

2 Answers 2

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I would understand it as teleport to anywhere in the world.

In context, it might also imply from anywhere, but that's a pragmatic conclusion, not part of the meaning.

Compare the verb ship: "We ship anywhere" means "to any destination".

This is an interesting question, because teleport is a fairly recent word coined to refer to an imaginary phenonmenon, but English speakers unhesitatingly treat it like existing words such as send and ship.

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    Colin, actually the sentence "We ship anywhere" when used by say UPS in the US, specifically means the other sense. ("You can do the act of shipping with us, pretty much anywhere - because we have so many offices in every city and town...") Any word whatsoever in English that has a "doing location" and an "ancillary location" (such as "destination") has this ambiguity. (Sure, one or the other may be more common in a given situation, but, so what, ambiguity is ambiguity.)
    – Fattie
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 13:28
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    It's not because of the word 'teleport' being new, it's just ambiguous (but understood by default to mean "teleport to). Compare to "I can run anywhere in Texas": it could either mean "anywhere I go in Texas, I can run there" -or- "I can run to any place in Texas".
    – BadZen
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 16:54
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    I don't agree with any of these comments, except Fattie's one about teleport stations. Maybe UPS meant "you can ship from anywhere", but it had never occurred to me that it even might mean that. I agree that, in a world in which teleport stations are a known thing, it could have that meaning. As for BadZen's analogy with "run", I don't accept it, because running doesn't have to be something doesn't have to be something you do from A to B: you can run at a place. You can't ship or teleport at a place, only from or to.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 17:27
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    @BadZen "but understood by default to mean "teleport to"" ...Hmm, I don't agree with that. Imagine we have teleporting, and retail companies like WalMart, UPS, Dunkin' Donuts offer the machine at their locations. There would be a big sign out the front: "Teleport here." The word "teleport" is, simply, totally ambiguous: like almost all words in English. Note that simply "jump" or "step" is utterly identically ambiguous to the word in question. Note indeed that a native English speaker would not even ask "is X ambiguous"; you may as well ask "do politicans lie!" :)
    – Fattie
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 18:33
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    So of course it is ambiguous, but there are defaults in ambiguity in language. I strongly suspect without any context most people would say those words 'usually' meant "teleport (to) anywhere", however, because that's how the word is colored psychologically. "Travel anywhere" is a more extremely (but still technically ambiguous) example. "Drive anywhere" is a less colored example, etc, etc
    – BadZen
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 18:46
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It's "to anywhere" that's implied, in my opinion. (though, that'd also imply from anywhere, since you couldn't teleport anywhere if you couldn't teleport from where you were)

English can be vague. Without clarification, a common sentence could mean a lot of things.

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    "English can be vague" Indeed. "can" in the sense that, say, "hookers can sometimes charge money" :O
    – Fattie
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 18:34
  • Re: "though, that'd also imply from anywhere": I don't understand why you say that. I see no problem with "This is an outbound teleportation hub; you can teleport anywhere from here."
    – ruakh
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 2:12
  • @ruakh That's what I inferred from that sentence used in isolation. (e.g. add on a "to here" to the end) Heck, teleport could even be a noun (like airport), if you cared enough.
    – bobsburner
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 9:19

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