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

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

#71

Post by quesera » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #56

below43 wrote: post #23

“Hospital bills”. That’s very country specific. Also, that’s two words.

Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean. Some cases are basically impossible "Crash blossoms" you don't stand any chance without knowing why we call them that Some are middling difficult, "Home Secretary" requires that you know every meaning for the two word…

I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.

But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.

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

#72

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

danesparza wrote: post #28

I don't think 'Words with spaces' is a thing. I think maybe the word the author is looking for is 'phrase'

The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed.

The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.

We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.

"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.

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

#73

Post by below43 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:08 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #56

below43 wrote: post #23

“Hospital bills”. That’s very country specific. Also, that’s two words.

Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean. Some cases are basically impossible "Crash blossoms" you don't stand any chance without knowing why we call them that Some are middling difficult, "Home Secretary" requires that you know every meaning for the two word…

In most English speaking countries it's a far from common phrase (ie. it's very USA-centric).

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

#74

Post by quesera » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

Wobbles42 wrote: post #72

danesparza wrote: post #28

I don't think 'Words with spaces' is a thing. I think maybe the word the author is looking for is 'phrase'

The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed. The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon. We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability. "Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extr…

I disagree that "saturday night" ever means anything other than the literal meaning of the nighttime of the day of saturday.

You can argue that there's a connotative association with the phrase. Sure. Just like "beach weather", or "blizzard conditions". But that doesn't make "saturday night" special in any way.

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

#75

Post by dec0dedab0de » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:11 PM UTC

Wobbles42 wrote: post #68

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

but what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils.

edit: In those other languages is it like how we use ice? where water is the default, but it could mean any frozen liquid?

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

#76

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:11 PM UTC

MarkusQ wrote: post #55

This boils down to an "is Pluto a planet" debate. We act as if some languages have "compound words" that can encompass entire sentences (subject & object attaching to the verb as prefixes or suffixes) while others don't form compounds, and most are somewhere in between. But these are all statements about lexicographic conventions and say nothing about the languages. In reality all languages are muddles sprawling acro…

This is a great comparison. We're arguing about the definition of "word", and attempting to expand it to include edge cases where two words with separate meanings have a different atomic meaning when combined.

We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.

Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.

I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.

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

#77

Post by quesera » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:11 PM UTC

below43 wrote: post #73

tialaramex wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean. Some cases are basically impossible "Crash blossoms" you don't stand any chance without knowing why we call them that Some are middling difficult, "Home Secretary" requires that you know every meaning for the two word…

In most English speaking countries it's a far from common phrase (ie. it's very USA-centric).

OK. But is the meaning any less literally-obvious than "grocery bills" or "electricity bills"?

Maybe you don't have "hospital bills". I don't have "landscaping bills", but I know exactly what they are.

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

#78

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

quesera wrote: post #71

tialaramex wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean. Some cases are basically impossible "Crash blossoms" you don't stand any chance without knowing why we call them that Some are middling difficult, "Home Secretary" requires that you know every meaning for the two word…

I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time. But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.

There seems to be a lot of overlap between this compound word concept and idioms. Both are largely atomic, defy analysis via individual word definition, and fairly language (and culture or dialect) specific.

Dictionaries are also language specific. We don't necessarily expect a 1:1 mapping of words between languages. I have personally always wondered if this subtley shapes thoughts in different languages as well.

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

#79

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

ticulatedspline wrote: post #18

ndr42 wrote: post #5

I imagine that languages like german that create composites of nouns have less of a problem with this: English: cream of mushroom soup Spanisch: sopa cremosa de champiñones German: Champignoncremesuppe

but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary. Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"

More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?

Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?

It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.

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

#80

Post by Wobbles42 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

johnhamlin wrote: post #43

I got into solving the NYT crossword during Covid. I couldn’t solve a Monday when I started; now I do Mondays downs-only and look forward to Saturdays. Along the way, I developed a sixth sense for when an answer will be more than one word. I’ve thought a lot about it and can’t really describe how I do it. (Some other puzzles clarify if an answer spans multiple words, but I find the ambiguity adds to the fun.)

Do you think this comes from a gradual internalization of a real linguistic concept? Or it more a familiarity with common (if unspoken) conventions of the puzzle makers?

I suspect the answer isn't binary, but it's interesting to think about.

This "sixth sense" phenomenon seems to pop up a lot. Crosswords are a great example. The sense some people are getting for detecting LLM output might be another.