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Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

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Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#241

Post by georgefrowny »

kllrnohj wrote: post #192
georgefrowny wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be iced cream, which is more descriptive. Ice cream is a shortened pronunciation.

When was called it "iced cream"? The first published recipe for ice cream in 1718 called it "ice cream", not "iced cream". The first recorded mention in English at all was in 1671 and there, again, it was "ice cream", not "iced cream".

Note that in the 1718 text it is not actually called "ice cream", but the recipe is titled "To ice cream". I.e. "ice" is used as a verb, the result presumably being "cream that has been iced". In the same work, there is also Chocolate-Cream so there was a choice not to write Ice-Cream there.

There are some attestations to it from 1732 onwards: https://archive.org/search?tab=fulltext&query=%22iced+cream%...

The attestations for ice cream (or often ice-cream, as these open compound words used to often be hyphenated -- the loss of that hyphen eventually leading to articles like this one) are much, much more and much messier, not least because someone tagged every edition of The Gentleman's Magazine as being published in 1731 -- the Internet Archive is a fantastic resource but I wish they'd allow crowd sourcing corrections for metadata. Excuse the m-dashes.

You may be right that it was mostly called ice cream at first and eventually at last. To be honest I took the Wiktionary etymology at its word.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#242

Post by 8bitsrule »

vunderba wrote: post #240
voidUpdate wrote: post #103

> “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"

Agree. You can of course treat "Boiling water" in its gerund form where it functions as a noun: "Boiling water should be performed in a metal pot". > It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter All of these are ancillary and depend on context, but in every one of these downstream cases the same underlying process is happening: the water is boiling.

> the water is boiling.

Not necessarily. It might refer to heating water to bring it to a boil.

Q. What are you doing over there?

A. Oh, just boiling water.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#243

Post by vunderba »

8bitsrule wrote: post #242
vunderba wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. You can of course treat "Boiling water" in its gerund form where it functions as a noun: "Boiling water should be performed in a metal pot". > It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter All of these are ancillary and depend on context, but in every one of these downstream cases the same underlying process is happening: the water is boiling.

> the water is boiling. Not necessarily. It might refer to heating water to bring it to a boil. Q. What are you doing over there? A. Oh, just boiling water.

That's using it as a [verb] [noun], not a gerund. If you are using it as a open compound word (or a gerund) - the "boiling water" IS in a boiling state.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#244

Post by georgefrowny »

Beijinger wrote: post #199
voidUpdate wrote: post #103

> “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"

"a state of matter", no boiling water is not a "state of matter"

It's a state that matter can be in. Which is not the same as the technical compound word "state of matter".

Which is why "state of matter" is, itself, often in the dictionary, possibly to the dismay of the Team Single Word in this comment section.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#245

Post by Beijinger »

georgefrowny wrote: post #244
Beijinger wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a state of matter", no boiling water is not a "state of matter"

It's a state that matter can be in. Which is not the same as the technical compound word "state of matter". Which is why "state of matter" is, itself, often in the dictionary, possibly to the dismay of the Team Single Word in this comment section.

I never heard about "boiling water" as a state of matter. Boiling water has two states of matter. Liquid and Gas, including a phase change. There are many of states of matter. I, as a chemist, would not be able to tell you most of them out of my head. Bose-Einstein condensate being one of them. Boiling water is not a state of matter. It may be a description of water, like cold water, flavoured water, carbonated water.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#246

Post by georgefrowny »

harperlee wrote: post #127

Surprised that no comment mentioned that there is a standard term (not a word :P) for the set of words that denominates a particular concept: nominal syntagm. Such as "boiling water" and also "that green parrot we saw yesterday over the left branch". Also the slider examples are abysmal. "I love you", "Go home" and "How are you" are not words by any stretch of imagination. For someone who makes word games, I don't se…

Funnily enough, "nominal syntagm" is, itself, not in the OED or Wiktionary. But Wiktionary has "syntagme nominal" as the French translation for "noun phrase".

You really have to love the human messiness of language!

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#247

Post by michaeld123 »

harperlee wrote: post #220
michaeld123 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha — you're probably right that it would have been less controversial. But I kept it precisely because it's arguable. Added a parenthetical acknowledging the HN debate and framing it as on-the-fence by design

Hey Michael, great project! If you don't mind me testing you, as a word game builder, what do you think about the latest developments of international policies?

Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#248

Post by georgefrowny »

Beijinger wrote: post #245
georgefrowny wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a state that matter can be in. Which is not the same as the technical compound word "state of matter". Which is why "state of matter" is, itself, often in the dictionary, possibly to the dismay of the Team Single Word in this comment section.

I never heard about "boiling water" as a state of matter. Boiling water has two states of matter. Liquid and Gas, including a phase change. There are many of states of matter. I, as a chemist, would not be able to tell you most of them out of my head. Bose-Einstein condensate being one of them. Boiling water is not a state of matter. It may be a description of water, like cold water, flavoured water, carbonated water…

That's exactly the point. It's a state (that of being boiling) that matter (some water) is in. Which is not the same as "state of matter", the compound word that is in the dictionary.

In talking about the validity of the suggested compound word "boiling water", an example of exactly what the article is talking about arises: when exactly does a sequence of invididual words (state, of, matter) become more than the sum of its parts?

A further question raised by your comment is does the existence of a compound word with a specific meaning then rule out use of the same words in a less specific manner? Perhaps for maximum clarity of expression, it's confusing, but is it wrong? It's an interesting point because if you didn't know the special meaning of the compound word "state of matter" then there is a word out there that is, completely unknown to you, invalidating your writing which would otherwise be correct both syntactically and semantically.

The general consensus among the HN crowd here seems to be quite vehement that "boiling water" has not reached the point where it "deserves" a dictionary entry. But there are words in many dictionaries like "cherry blossom" that I would say are little more deserving.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#249

Post by OoooooooO »

Skeime wrote: post #173
vidarh wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 tw…

Fun fact: I looked this up in the online version of the Duden (the predominant German dictionary). It does have an entry "Black Hole" (so the English term!) but not for "schwarzes Loch", which is the normal German term for it. (In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)

The Duden is not official since 1996.

Since 2004 the official guidelines for the german speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Swiss, Belgium, South Tirol, Liechtenstein, Romania, Hungary - see this founding document with the list: https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/wiener_erklaerung.pdf) are covered by the Rechtschreibrat (https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/).

The official german dictionary is here: https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6774

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#250

Post by OoooooooO »

Beijinger wrote: post #208
kdheiwns wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Boiling water is not a word. The phrase contains two words. While German has no word for "boiling water", it uses two words too, an adjective and a noun, the German language has the principle of composite words. As a consequence, there is an infinite amount of German words. "Hackernewsleser" would be a word I just made up but every German can understand. A reader of Hackernews. Obviously this makes a dictionary trick…

I would write it Hackernews-Leser for better readability but both goes.
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