With a symbolic approach, the right thing is to use a different symbol for each meaning, and disambiguate based on context (which you could identify either statistically or by using rules).

In particular, words are not repositories of meaning. They allude to concepts; new concepts are created and get forgotten on a regular basis. The connection between words and concepts waxes and wanes over time, and even the very timeline of a connection's strength can be used for allusion: using language to represent concepts that can only be coherently mapped by using previously-stronger allusions conveys a sense of being old-fashioned, while the reverse conveys future-thinking. Using allusions that are stronger within a milieu conveys social signalling information about group membership. Etc.

There's no way a human-maintained database is going to capture the subtlety here on anything like a timely basis. There's no universal truth, everyone's map is a little bit different, and the map is changing all the time.

People who speak the same language are able to communicate perfectly well, almost all of the time, across continents and centuries. New words are rare compared to existing vocabulary and often soon disappear from use. New concepts can readily be mapped onto existing vocabulary. People are able to learn other languages and improve their own with the help of dictionaries and grammar books. Things like humour, cryptic crosswords, and social signalling are edge cases. And things like deception are unrelated to language understanding at the semantic level.

We're discussing the best way for computers to understand natural language and communicate with people, and in practice that's either going to use unambiguous language or it's going to need human help or verification.

People who speak the same language are still prone to misunderstandings.

We may be overestimating our success in communication. Heck, I'm not even sure if my understanding of soon equals yours. Is it a century, a few decades, a few years? And why is it so different from the meaning when I use it to answer when lunch will be ready?

The former doesn't exist in human languages (we'd otherwise have gotten rid of the lawyers long ago), and the latter is infeasible. There is a another way.