I know the words are far apart, but I wondered if there were enough words in the English language to afford less ambiguity.

But then the average person has maybe 3,000 on tap. A journalist maybe 5,000 (add songwriters). So the choice of 40,000 out of maybe 500,000 (Concise OED ie) is quite a big chunk.
Considering all the Englishes there are (see Micro$oft Word for instance) and they wanted it to be fairly universal, I guess the pool of useful words was considerably less than 500,000.

Faucet would be out because Brits (me!) would struggle with the spelling. Which begs the question - does the system have a spell correction feature, and how is it applied?

FreddyHeadey - quite! But I bet they don't have bodhran in their lexicon. So I am safe!