Talk:lots of

RFD discussion: August–September 2016

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lots of

Redirect to lotsa. It's SOP. Why would one think that most people who searched "lots of" would want to get lotsa? Actually, I was looking to see if lots of had an idiomatic meaning of some sort. It's totally SOP too, and doesn't merit an entry at all. The entry for lotsa itself even separates lots from of in its contraction template. Delete. Philmonte101 (talk) 04:00, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

This is obviously related to the lot of ("all") and a lot. Ostensibly our first sense of lot#Noun covers this. In that sense, though, it is a funny noun, not accepting most adjectives (or attributive nouns). I think it does not normally accept anything other than intensifiers like great and fucking. The existence of lotsa, lotta, and alot suggests that many speakers don't think of this as a noun. I think the purported synomyms (load, pile, mass), which are only a subset of all the words (eg, ton, heap, ocean) that can be used to quantify uncountable (and countable?) nouns retain more noun characteristics. Load is the one that seems to behave almost exactly the same as lot, except for the merging with the indefinite article and with of/a, but others like ton and heap are similar to load.

We could redirect all of the lot of, a lot of, and lots of specifically to sense 1 of lot#Noun.

One thing we shouldn't do IMO is redirect to lotsa, which is in the wrong register and sometimes considered non-standard. DCDuring TALK 04:59, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

I agree with DCDuring, no redirect to lotsa. Keep as is. DonnanZ (talk) 08:24, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

• This entry has already been redirected to lotsa, which is highly informal. Shouldn't the redirect be undone? It's a kind of preposition. See usage notes in Oxford [1]. DonnanZ (talk) 10:42, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't see how it could be a preposition; maybe a determiner. Equinox ◑ 10:45, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

It does behave a lot like a determiner, as do the lot of ("all") and a lot of ("many, a large quantity"). But the other terms like tons/a ton (of) and loads/a load (of) behave in a very similar ways. OTOH, those expressions wouldn't work replacing a lot underlined above. DCDuring TALK 15:21, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

• Change redirect target to lots. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:52, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

What Angr said, per a lot of. Renard Migrant (talk) 13:16, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Re-direct to lots (which is where it originally pointed) or to sense 1 of lot. - -sche (discuss) 03:43, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Redirected back to lots. We don't normally RFD redirects, by the way. --WikiTiki89 15:16, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89 I've done it before for to have. Is it better to send these to RFDO? PseudoSkull (talk) 22:05, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

RFD is the appropriate venue for them. I think the point is just that redirects are usually allowed to live unless they are problematic (e.g., the redirect is a short single word that is likely to exist as an entry-deserving word in another language). Obviously, it's subjective whether a redirect is problematic or not, so I think it was OK to bring this redirect up for discussion here. One difference between this and to have is that "lotsa" is a contraction and it's plausible that someone would expect a dictionary to lemmatize the uncontracted form, whereas anyone searching for a verb would quickly realize that we never include "to" in verbs' pages' titles, so people are unlikely to be (or at least, are discouraged from) looking up "to have". - -sche (discuss) 21:59, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

This decision is total stupidity of course. Perhaps lotsa should be deleted. Fair's fair. DonnanZ (talk) 17:00, 3 December 2017 (UTC)