Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by michaeld123 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

thmpp wrote: post #32

While '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 c…

The very bottom of the slider is there to illustrate where LLM artifacts and Wiktionary noise live — it's not presented as legitimate vocabulary. The slider lets you see the full quality gradient, including where it breaks down.

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

#62

Post by pvillano » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

hmokiguess wrote: post #37

On another note, I always wished "never mind" was spelled "nevermind"

"Each other" is like that for me, and according to search results, a lot of other people. I pronounce it ee-chother.

"Eachother" feels as natural as "somebody", "nobody", "anybody" to me

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

#63

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #27

simlevesque wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first two I kind of understand what the author means. But "help me" and "severe pain" made me think that I'm just not the right public for this text.

I don’t see how boiling water could ever be a single word. Would that mean we need entries for every other liquid boiling? i guess Saturday night could have some extra details explaining the context around our standard work week. But even that is a stretch.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by hagbard_c » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #40

hagbard_c wrote: post #15

Earlier 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

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).

Nope, water vapour is the gas phase of water mixed with other gases while steam is just the gas phase of water. Water vapour can condense into tiny droplets which can freeze into ice crystals, both of which are visible as 'clouds'. Steam is not visible until it condenses into droplets at which point it no longer is steam but water suspended in another medium, usually air.

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

#65

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #60

dragonwriter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas": You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants). I was Main Propulsion Assistant on a steam powered destroyer, and I can assure you that every effort is made to prevent droplets being suspended in the steam--because such droplets erode the blades on steam turbines. To that end, steam coming out of the stem drum (the upper part of th…

> You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants

Well, that's true, I haven't, BUT still I went back and forth writing and deleting and rewriting and eventually deleting a whole digression about the special case of the jargon of steam power and how it uses “wet steam” (or “saturated steam”) for “steam” in the general use sense and “dry steam” for “water vapor” and “superheated steam” for dry steam created by heating wet steam away from contact with water, before deciding that was way too much, but, yeah, that's all true. (And, in details about the actual processes used, a lot more than I knew or would have gone into even if I had and had decided to keep the digression.)

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

#66

Post by pvillano » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

aaroninsf wrote: post #20

With Twain in mind, might I suggest we adopt the simple expedient of snake casing such terms.

Finally, someone who actually thought about where to draw the line instead of rejecting words with spaces entirely.

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

#67

Post by gligierko » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

ticulatedspline wrote: post #21

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

They're clearly a bit over-zealous bout what examples they think have meaning. They cite substitution as a good test for a phrase but double down on boiling water. > Lexicographers used a substitutability test: if you can swap synonyms freely, it’s not a lexical unit. “Cold feet” (meaning fear) can’t become “frigid feet”—so it gets an entry. But the test cuts both ways. You can say “boiling water” but not “seething w…

I removed that sentence/claim, I see the point that "boiling" and "raging" was a bad example.

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

#68

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #41

jakub_g wrote: post #33

Earlier 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?

We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.

While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system.

This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but it has practical everyday consequences. It's why boiling food works so consistently as a universal cooking option.

You don't need to control the temperature of boiling water, it is an exact temperature that depends only on ambient pressure. As a consequence recipes work by only specifying time, sometimes with a single adjustment for people at higher altitudes.

This is remarkable given the wide variety of containers and heat sources used, and it is used practically by virtually every cooking tradition, even if it's reason for working is not common knowledge.

It shouldn't be surprising it'd acquire a single word as a unified concept.

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

#69

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

butvacuum wrote: post #29

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

A dictionary is an enumeration of words. A thesaurus is a mapping between existing words.

Every word in a thesaurus belongs in a dictionary.

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

#70

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #27

simlevesque wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first two I kind of understand what the author means. But "help me" and "severe pain" made me think that I'm just not the right public for this text.

I don’t see how boiling water could ever be a single word. Would that mean we need entries for every other liquid boiling? i guess Saturday night could have some extra details explaining the context around our standard work week. But even that is a stretch.

A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water.

It likely could apply to other liquids in the same mixed state, but would be assumed to refer to water (or solutions or colloidal mixtures primarily consisting of water) in common speech.

Water is extremely common, and has anonymously high heats of crystalization and vaporization, so it is the most common example of a mixed phase system and the only one most people encounter in everyday life.