“Hospital bills”. That’s very country specific. Also, that’s two words.
What does it mean?
Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
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Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#32While 'this analysis would not have been possible without LLM', I am not sure the LLM analysis was well reviewed after it has been done. From the obscure/familiar word list, some of the n-grams, e.g. "is resource", "seq size", "db xref" surely happen in the wild (we well know), but I would doubt that we can argue they are missing from the dictionary. Knowing the realm, I would argue none of them are words, not even collocations. If "is resource" is, why not, "has resource"?
So while the path is surely interesting, this analysis does miss scrutiny, which you would expect from a high-level LLM analysis.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#33There are nearly half a million compound phrases that aren’t in any dictionary—simply because they contain spaces. “Boiling water.” “Saturday night.” “Help me.” I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.
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").
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freezing water doesn't have a word, it only gets one after water has changed phase. Boiling water also gets a word once it has changed phase: steam. ice - water - steam
Right. (I’m not sure if you’re aware but that’s exactly what I said.)
Almost but not exactly, 'boiled water' can go two ways: phase changed to steam (at which point is is no longer 'boiled water') or boiled and cooled again. Pedantic? Sure. Fits right in here? Absolutely.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rest of the article did a good job explaining that. I just think those were terrible examples for the introduction. I think "shut up", "good night", and "hot dog" would have really got the point across better, but those might already be in dictionaries.
'hot dog' belongs in a thesaurus, not a dictionary. It's just a type of sausage.
It’s a type of sausage, but they are definitely not synonymous. At least not in American English.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#36"Opaque MWE"? Does no one know the word "idiom"?
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#37On another note, I always wished "never mind" was spelled "nevermind"
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#38A compound word isn't just a phrase. The latter is a group of words that indicate a single concept. The former is a new word that has a distinct meaning from the subwords that compose it. "I love you" is an example of a clausal phrase. The meaning is entirely evident from the words that compose it. In contrast, a "hot dog" is not a particularly warm canine, and has its own OED entry [0] as a compound word.
And some of the entries on this list are wrong. "Good night" exists in OED as "goodnight" [1] because there are multiple ways it's used. One is the clausal phrase "I hope you have a good night", which can be modified by changing the adjective, e.g. "great night" or "terrible night". "Goodnight" the bedtime ritual can't be modified the same way, so OED chooses to write it as a compound word without spaces.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#39There are nearly half a million compound phrases that aren’t in any dictionary—simply because they contain spaces. “Boiling water.” “Saturday night.” “Help me.” I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.
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").
I mean it’s interesting that this is generally the case with many (or even most) words across languages… But I’d wager it’s more the norm than the exception, so I don’t know if “boiling water” is that interesting of an example.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#40> Got a word Didn’t > frozen water → ice boiling water Freezing water doesn’t have a word. Boiled water does have a word.
Freezing water doesn't have a word, it only gets one after water has changed phase. Boiling water also gets a word once it has changed phase: steam. ice - water - steam
Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas; water in the gas phase is “water vapor” which also doesn't have a single word.
This is also an interesting case because “vapor” without a qualifier also refers to a suspension of solid or liquid particles in gas (of which “steam” is a particular example).