Talk:pedometer

pronunciation

the pronunciation of etymology 2 is likely different, possibly with /i:/ and initial syllable stress. —Soap— 13:49, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Etymology 2 seems spurious

Back in 2020 User:17jiangz1 added a second sense to this page. (The diff.) They claimed that “pedometer” was a North American spelling of “paedometer”, an instrument for measuring children.

I have not been able to find any evidence that this is true.

• Brewster's Online Etymology Dictionary is cited on this page but does not have an entry of “paedometer” and does not say anything about “pedometer” being related to pedo- (child).

• I also checked the Oxford English Dictionary. Their entry for “paedometer” labels it as obsolete and rare, and has only one citation, from a medical lexicon from 1848. (In OED jargon, it is a “rare⁰”—no actual use of the word has been found.) It does not give a variant spelling. The OED entry for “pedometer” does not suggest that it can be an alternative spelling of “paedometer”.

If this were Wikipedia I would wait a couple of days to see if there is any objection and then, if there wasn't, just remove the spurious etymology under the be bold policy. I will check out the Wiktionary:Wiktionary_for_Wikipedians page and related pages and try to find out if that is the right course of action here also.

Update: I notified User:17jiangz1 on their talk page.

Mark Dominus (talk) 17:00, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

I see that under Wiktionary:Criteria_for_inclusion#General_rule, this sense of “pedometer” should probably not be included:

• “if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means” — on current evidence, this seems extremely unlikely
• “if it is attested” — I have not been able to find an attestation. As I explained above, I have not found it in the dictionaries I have consulted.

And I now see that we have our own WT:BOLD. So I will delete this sense tomorrow if nobody objects before then.

Mark Dominus (talk) 18:20, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

I have done this. Mark Dominus (talk) 15:10, 8 August 2024 (UTC)