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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

#91

Post by bigbadfeline »

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?

> but boiled water is steam > We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.

I don't know how it is in other languages but in English "boiled water" and "boiling water" refer to different things - boiled water may be steam or water that has underwent some boiling, e.g. for sanitation, on the other hand "boiling water" refers strictly to water that is in the process of boiling.

I can see why some languages may have a separate word for one of these concepts to avoid some of the ambiguity.

I'm not a fan of extending the language with new words unless they are compound (with or without spaces) but extending the dictionaries with more and better descriptions is a no-brainer, there's a lot missing from them.

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

#92

Post by tialaramex »

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.

> But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger

Ginger ale is in fact, not an ale, it's a soft drink. It is distantly related to Ginger Beer and some variants of Ginger Beer are alcoholic like ales, but Ginger ale was conceived as a soft drink and today continues as a soft drink.

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

#94

Post by beAbU »

Hah, I wonder how thick a German, Dutch or Afrikaans dictionary would be if it included all possible spaceless compound words. Literally any concept can be compounded together to make a new word.

Roovleisslaghuisinspekteur =

Rooi = red

Vleis = meat

Slag = butcher

Huis = house

Inspekteur = inspector

"Inspector who controls the quality of red meat in butcheries"

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

#95

Post by quesera »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #88
quesera wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more than overlap -- they are the same thing. I.e. AFAICT, all compound words that defy literal interpretation are idioms. And it's that simple. The argument then becomes that idioms should be in the dictionary. Some of them are of course, but idioms and slang are a) fast-moving, and b) often dismissed by the sorts of people who edit dictionaries.

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 it to the dictionary yet. (which dictionary becomes an important question -- I'd expect to see it in M-W before, say, OED)

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

#96

Post by quesera »

tialaramex wrote: post #92
quesera wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger Ginger ale is in fact, not an ale, it's a soft drink. It is distantly related to Ginger Beer and some variants of Ginger Beer are alcoholic like ales, but Ginger ale was conceived as a soft drink and today continues as a soft drink.

My (likely ignorant) understanding was that the non-alcoholic "ale"s and "beer"s were fermented like their traditional versions, but the process was stopped before the ethanol level became significant.

Mass-market ginger ales and root beers are not made that way today, of course.

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

#97

Post by quesera »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #89
quesera wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am with you on the literal definition there. I wonder if the connotative association is exactly what we are trying to capture here though, and if those other phrases also fit in at the "separate words but slightly special" end of the spectrum. There is meaning being communicated in all of those phrases that would be obvious to most or all people who are embedded in the language and culture where they are used, and…

It's an evocative phrase. It definitely means different things to different people though. Teenager vs adult, single vs married, employed vs not.

Or how about "Sunday morning"? It's evocative for sure. But very differently for different groups.

Or "island breeze". Stirs up images and feelings. But the definition is literal and the connotations are somewhat personal.

I'd argue that none of these phrases belong in a dictionary. Possibly explicitly because the "missing" meanings are the associative connotations, but those vary for different people, so what's the canonical definition?

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

#98

Post by BobaFloutist »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #85
gligierko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cool, going back over them I'm actually surprised at the strength of the substitution test, thus far I haven't really encountered one that strongly goes against the test if a suitable synonym is picked. There are a few things for which English simply doesn't have anything to substitute and those are harder to assess. boiling is one but so would "blood" in "blood pressure", obviously replacing it with another liquid h…

"Simmering H20", for all that simmering isn't quite the same as boiling, is pretty clearly more or less identical to boiling water.

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

#99

Post by robocat »

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…

> somewhere esoteric technical distinction

When those technical distinctions are important we use specific technical terms for them (of which there are a few different ones for the phase transition - depending on discipline).

The cooking term is "rolling boil" which is a nice two word combo with a specific meaning.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #70
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mixe…

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