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Chinese does this to itself all the time. Most words are two-syllable, two-character words. Often when you look up the meaning of the first character it literally means the same thing as the two-character word.

That's because over the course of 2000 years of language evolution, loss of tones and phonemes from Classical Chinese and the addition of new words in the vocabulary, that first syllable has become too ambiguous in the spoken language.

In an analogy, to tie it back to the top:

- do you mean cuddle, the act of physical intimacy, or cudele, the sea creature?
- yeah I meant the cuttle fish
- ok, got you