Wiktionary talk:Hall of Fame/archive

suggestions

Worst gloss: trampolo; worst plural: sneakers. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 00:54, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

lol @ trampolo! I've cleaned it up, though; I worked out which non-bird sense was meant by checking Google images. And I switched sneakers to use the same format everyone at RFD seemed to like on trainers. I think that saves both entries, and Wiktionary's reputation! :) - -sche (discuss) 01:47, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

I think that hoeng1gong2 jyu5jin4hok6 hok6wui6 jyut6jyu5 ping3jam1 fong1on3 deserves a place on the list but I can't think of a good reason why. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:04, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

It could go in the anteroom of silliness as "surprisingly not the result of keyboard mashing". Or "Entries which look like keyboard mashing" could be a category? lol - -sche (discuss) 02:24, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

It faces stiff competition from FlatO@InsideChesthigh-PalmDown-FlatO@InsideChesthigh-PalmDown Nod FlatO@InsideChesthigh-PalmForward-FlatO@Inside-PalmForward OpenB@SideChesthigh-OpenB@SideChesthigh OpenB@SideTrunkhigh-OpenB@SideTrunkhigh. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:14, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

This word really gets me, in the vein of keyboard-mashing: Albanian gjyq. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:24, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

And this goes in the somewhat related but equally silly category "not surprisingly the result of keyboard smashing": くぁｗせｄｒｆｔｇｙふじこｌｐ；. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:31, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

• Longest living incorrect pronunciation: /ˈʌnu/ at Portuguese ano, added in 2004, removed in 2013. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 22:05, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

• Most prons: pwn. Also, note the amount of past participles. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 13:22, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

• Another one for the anteroom of silliness: English word that looks the most unEnglish, kthxbye. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:32, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

  On this topic, as Equinox remarked on its talk page, Q'anjob'al may be the most Klingon-looking non-Klingon word. - -sche (discuss) 18:39, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

papadom

papadom is a strong candidate for the "most alternative forms" title. --Rowboater (talk) 22:14, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

So it is! Thanks! - -sche (discuss) 23:19, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

But are all the forms citeable? I specifically checked each form at Hanukkah. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:17, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

OK, I've checked all the forms; about half turned out to be bogus. - -sche (discuss) 03:07, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Most alt. forms

Knowledge. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 01:57, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Weeding out the ones which are only attested in Middle English, or are not attested at all, knocks it from 30 down to 16, but that's still impressive. - -sche (discuss) 18:06, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Note to self, investigate barghest and hajduk. - -sche (discuss) 22:07, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks for all the help with Gaddafi! Think you could perform the same services for Muammar? I searched pretty extensively, but of course I may have missed some. Anyway, I doubt we'll ever find any term that can outdo that in alt forms, but if we do, I'm betting on another Arabic name (have you tried looking for more for Muhammad?). — This unsigned comment was added by Metaknowledge (talk • contribs).

  Now that you mention it, I can find some more alt forms of Muhammad... it hadn't occurred to me to look for terminal -id, -ut and other schwas. - -sche (discuss) 04:26, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

  A sneaky method is to steal from other languages. Turkish, Persian, and French caused the proliferation at Husayn; I think that spellings like Maxamed (from Somali) should be fair game. Plus, you can try to find scholarly transliterations, which I've been ignoring, but which could have diacritics etc and still be citeable. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:38, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

  Try forms with -ph- and -f- (and maybe -ff-). — Ungoliant ^(falai) 13:30, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

  I did manage to find one attested -ph- variant of Gaddafi. Or were you talking about Muhammad? (I can find MOffAMMED as a scanno of MOHAMMED, lol.) - -sche (discuss) 22:27, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

  Muhammad. Baphomet derived from Muhammad so I expect there might be some mediaeval forms with -f- or -ph-. Probably Hispanicisms as /f/ is the regular adaptation of /ħ/ in Old Spanish loanwords from Andalusian Arabic. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 01:39, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Most parts of speech

Portuguese a: letter, noun, article, pronoun, preposition, verb, contraction. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 02:31, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Worst formatting

[1] (Volapük section): a word related to half the language’s other words. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 02:11, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

I dunno. The user who did that did that to a lot of pages, and the information is not exactly incorrect (or even badly formatted)... it's just very copious. - -sche (discuss) 02:45, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

I’d consider lists that long without {{top2}} ~ 5 or {{rel-top}} badly formatted. Most of the content is unnecessary anyway. Why add SoP to Derived terms? Why add term only remotely related to dinosaur to See also? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 02:53, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Descendants section completeness

Appendix:Latin/metipsimus. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 05:00, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Impressive! - -sche (discuss) 14:07, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

I imagine we can find (or make) some really comprehensively 'descended from' PIE roots, too (especially using Yair's etymtree, modelled here, to show all the descendants on one page without actually duplicating the text itself across pages). - -sche (discuss) 14:10, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

I imagine if someone fleshed out Appendix:Proto-Sino-Tibetan/s-la or 茶, it would overtake even शर्करा. - -sche (discuss) 02:12, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Honestly, the bulk of it would come from outside of Europe, which is where Wiktionary gets weak. I could do it by spending a day at the library, I suppose, but it seems pointless. (Same situation with the descendants of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía).) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:04, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Don't worry about getting to a library; just the translations we already have in tea will push this to the top, once I sort out who borrowed what from where. - -sche (discuss) 08:52, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

It's not so easy! For example, did the smaller languages of East Africa (for most of which I doubt we have translations anywhere on this project except at water) borrow it directly from the source, or via Swahili? I suspect the latter, but I doubt it's even knowable. For that matter, our entry says that Swahili got it from Hindi, which I suppose is ultimately true, but I bet it went via Persian. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:12, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Do you mean via Arabic? Hindi चाय seems to derive from Persian (rather than to have led to a Persian word), because I've read that the y in Persian čây (and hence in Hindi chai) is a grammatical suffix the Persians added to the ča form they borrowed. For languages where it's not clear whether or not there was an intermediary, I've put it under the known ancestor with a note 'possibly via X'. (I wonder if all the loanwords are of interest to anyone besides Wiktionarians, or if we should collapse them or put them in a separate table, where they wouldn't swamp the few inherited [Chinese] words.) - -sche (discuss) 02:36, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Anteroom of Silliness

I nominate this definition — Ungoliant ^(falai) 00:35, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Sadly, I've seen a lot of entries like that. There used to be some German ones, though I just googled site:en.wiktionary.org "A German prefix" and it looks like they've all been taken care of. Czech still has do-, nade-, od-, roze-, and se-. - -sche (discuss) 01:19, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

I think this entry, especially the last def, deserves a place. Unless, of course, you have any clue whatsoever about what's going on there. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:04, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Sadly, that entry is far from unusual; it's an example of what DCDuring justly calls "the near-incoherent terseness of our copyings of a 110-year old Sanskrit dictionary". Many (most?) of the things en.Wikt copied from Monier-Williams are similarly incomprehensibly curt or else not even English at all (महाभारत is a tame example; I can't offhand find any of the more elaborately unintelligible examples I've seen). - -sche (discuss) 04:18, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

• I think that this diff really deserves a place on the list. (Maybe Etymology Man could help out...) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:19, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Most spellings

疙瘩 has 18, including the lemma and simplified forms of alternatives. —suzukaze (t・c) 03:23, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Most syllables in a single glyph

This is language-specific and so not a good Hall of Fame category, but 志, 承, and 詔 all have unusually many morae packed into a single glyph. Does Chinese have any single glyphs that stand for 5+ syllables? What words in languages that you know pack the greatest number of syllables into the fewest letters? - -sche (discuss) 22:58, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

In Chinese, it's very rare for a single glyph to represent more than one syllable. This Chinese character (not in Unicode) represents 4 syllables, but I don't know of any characters that represent more than that in Chinese (though I'm not an expert by any means). The Arabic ligatures ﷺ and ﷽, which are in Unicode, look like they represent about 10 syllables. And some of the Ancient Greek ligatures here may also be of interest. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 23:11, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

圕 can be read as túshūguǎn (Mandarin)/toshokan (Japanese) but it's contrived. —suzukaze (t・c) 23:20, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't consider a single Unicode codepoint for a sequence of numerous Arabic glyphs making up several distinct, spaced words to be a single glyph. The polysyllabic Chinese signs are interesting; it's also neat that signs are still being created. It occurs to me that several languages have long letter-names (epsilon, double-u, etc, and even more if you add diacritics like ŵ), but self-referential things like that ("ŵ is a word meaning the sign ŵ") are not very interesting IMO. - -sche (discuss) 15:35, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

慮(おもんぱか)る (omonpakaru) is also unusual. —suzukaze (t・c) 08:23, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

餞(うまのはなむけ) (uma no hanamuke). —suzukaze (t・c) 03:06, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Longest English words

...are tracked by Category:Long English words, I see. It's swamped with chemical names and I'm not sure how interesting it really is. - -sche (discuss) 06:33, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

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Hall of Shame

Exceptionally bad things.

Moved off the main page in preparation for the page possibly becoming official, because this probably isn't of interest to the average user (and may leave negative impressions of the site). - -sche (discuss) 19:34, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Worst language naming problems

• Kara. 6–8 languages vie for this name: zra (a Korean language, also called Kaya), kxh (an Omotic language, also called Karo... like btx; see also arr/Citations:Arara/aap), leu (a language of Papua New Guinea, rarely called Lemakot), reg (a language of Tanzania), kah (a language of the Central African Republic, also called Fer), kcm (a language of the Central African Republic...also called Gula...which is the name of five other languages), some Sudanese language, and some Ethiopian language (see Citations:Kara). See also the w:Kara languages. ([2])

  Oh, and gya (a language of Cameroon and the Central African Republic, the principle variety of which is Kàrà / Kara / Gbaya Kara). (Compare gso, which also called Buli, which is the name of two other languages.)

• gel : previously called Kag-Fer-Jiir-Koor-Ror-Us-Zuksun.

Worst bureaucratic rabbit holes

• on not one but two occasions, active policy votes were subjected to requests for deletion

Worst formatting

• The original version of noncuplication, which was for a time unviewable: the formatting was so bad it broke the page. IPA modifier letters were misused as superscripts, other templates (which called still other templates) were nested inside {{term}}, the etymology asserted that the term was formed on the pattern of a nonexistent/redlinked term...
• Many Sanskrit entries suffer from what one user calls "the near-incoherent terseness of our copyings of a 110-year old Sanskrit dictionary" (Monier-Williams); often, they are only partly in English, partly in Sanskrit, and partly in a code that is sometimes indistinguishable from keyboard-mashing; for example, बुध् (budh) (old revision) and शालिवाहन (śālivāhana) (revision).