Goldenshimmer

name

What sense is "not the US sense" of the word? You can use the {{gloss}} template. It's better to say what it is than what it is not. DTLHS (talk) 23:02, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi @DTLHS! Thanks for that advice! I've changed it as such: name#Etymology_2; US usage tends to refer to the moist-fleshed sweet potato as a yam, while the rest of the world uses it to mean name (Dioscorea spp.); see the usage note at yam. Goldenshimmer (talk) 23:25, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Templates

Hi! We have a template, {{alternative form of}} (shortcut {{altform}}), for alternative forms; it is preferred to just writing our "alternative form of". Likewise, {{synonym of}} exists for synonyms. It would be good if you could convert the entries you've added to use these templates. Also, note that English words need to be have been used three times in books and other durably archived media in order to have entries; some things you've entered, like teufit and tequhyt, don't seem to be attested (at least judging from google books:"teufits"; google books:"tequhyt" seems to have been used only in one Scots book). - -sche (discuss) 23:14, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

@-sche Hi, thanks for the advice! I'll add those templates. Regarding the various forms of tewit, I found them in the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM version 4.0.0.3 for Mac.... Goldenshimmer (talk) 23:18, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi again @-sche, I think they're all changed to templates now. I just did the tewit variants, because it looks like @User:DTLHS already did the root vegetables and dance moves. Thank you again User:-sche and User:DTLHS for the help and information! :D Goldenshimmer (talk) 23:36, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

All entries must also have a headword. In entries such as tequhyt we would generate one using the {{en-noun}} template. This will put the entry into the correct "category". SemperBlotto (talk) 03:18, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks @SemperBlotto! :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 03:27, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I think I got them all done with headwords now :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 03:39, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

re templates: Fantastic, thank you! re OED: The OED sometimes includes words which haven't actually been used in English: in some cases they include words merely because they are mentioned in other dictionaries(!); in other cases, they include words that have only been used once (not multiple times, as we require), or that are so old they are more correctly labelled Middle English, or that are actually Scots rather than English. Therefore, it's a good idea to check if words have actually been used. Google Books is the easiest search engine to check, although there are others (Google Scholar and Issuu archive journals and magazines and newspapers). - -sche (discuss) 04:16, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

@-sche: Ugh, ok. That'll take a while probably; not something I'll take on tonight. I also suspect that Google Books, Google Scholar, and Issuu aren't really optimal for this sort of thing, being prone to OCR errors and having limited selections of texts available. (Also I strongly dislike commercial things like that, so I'll probably be avoiding them.) I tend to use the Internet Archive's collections for searching old books, but they also have lots of OCR errors and a limited quantity of data. -_- I think that without the tremendous resources of the OED team, it's probably a somewhat futile effort for me at the moment. (Maybe they could be convinced to make their source data publicly available? That would be very cool….) Feel free to can any of those pages in the meantime, if you like, in light of OED's different criteria for inclusion. Thanks :) Goldenshimmer (talk) 04:26, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I've listed the tewit forms at RFV, so other people can help find quotations. :) I've found quotations for two of them; the rest don't seem to have been used. Google Books' corpus is three or four times Archive.org's, and has better OCR in my experience, so I do think it's worth checking, especially since it's so easy and free to search. - -sche (discuss) 00:20, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

yams and sweet potatoes

It looks like I'm going to have to spend the whole day tomorrow cleaning up all your edits. The names for all of these vegetables are a constant source of confusion, and it's very common for even very good references to get some things very, very wrong. You don't know the languages involved (I doubt that satsumaimo exists as anything but transliterated Japanese, for instance), and you're a bit fuzzy about what's a dictionary-worthy term and what's a string of separate words. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I think there's some validity to the expression fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and the sheer volume of new entries isn't helping... Chuck Entz (talk) 04:56, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, I'm going to bed now, but for whatever it's worth, the satsumaimo entry you linked above has been listed as English since Sept. 2015 when it was added by @SemperBlotto; I added the alternative spelling satsuma imo, which was already a red link on that page. Regarding that word, anyway, I rest my case. Goldenshimmer (talk) 05:15, 25 March 2016 (UTC)