sometimes singular semantic concepts can take multiple syntactic words to express. Why not call this idea something other than “word”?
Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
141–150 of 286 posts
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#142I disagree these belong in a traditional dictionary.
I could, however be convinced these could be documented/defined in a separate document, especially from the perspective you are coming from (word games).
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#143sometimes singular semantic concepts can take multiple syntactic words to express. Why not call this idea something other than “word”?
We could call it a "phrase".
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#144> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup? Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional…
[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you]
Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.
E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.
In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.
Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.
I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#145This feels like ragebait (rage bait?) for people that enjoy language and words. The leading example is nonsense.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite interesting that "boiling water" in many Slavic languages is actually a separate word (and not derived from "water", but from "boiling"; similar how the author mentions "ice" being used instead of "frozen water").
It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water. in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?
In Norwegian, we have "isvann" - ice water - which can both mean water implied to be cold enough to feel like it has recently melted, or specifically water with ice in it.
If you're asking for isvann at a restaurant, you'd expect to get water with ice, not just very cold water.
But if you're talking about having gone bathing in isvann one spring, it specifically means in water that - whether or not there is actually ice in it - is cold enough that it might have recently melted.
(I'm a native speaker, but had to look up the precise nuance there to be sure I wasn't just making stuff up)
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#147> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Some other words that are sorely missing from dictionaries: "Warm water", "hot water", "cold water", "dirty water"
As an idiomatic expression, "Hot water" = "trouble".
Are there idiomatic expressions for warm/cold/dirty water, which mean something other than a literal adjective describing the temperature or condition of water?
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#148> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
What's ice cream then?
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to agree. The definitions overlap perfectly. At the same time, I am having intuitive issues seeing "hot dog" as an idiom, vs just an ordinary noun. It certainly seems to follow noun rules, and fit into speech as one. I don't know for sure that it's NOT an idiom though. I could just be wrong here, and have intuition in need of calibration.
No, I think you're right -- "hot dog" started out as a colloquial name for a type of sausage (apparently as something of a joke, because dog meat was sometimes eaten in the area, and it was a low-quality product), and it is now the accepted name. So it was an idiom, now it's canon. Another good one might be "hot dish", which has an idiomatic meaning in the midwestern US, and is slowly spreading. Not sure if it's made…
I wonder where "sausage dog" fits into this lexicon
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#150> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
I would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.