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Oldest tagged RFTs

• shadowing
  belly dance
  half
  Surinam
  away
  series
  address
  amen
  joke
  how much
  mandate
  imaginary
  catalogue
  on purpose
  notch
  based
  berm
  rayon
  bok choy
  Aster
  nasal cavity
  dies Mercurii
  -stan
  monosemic
  tweener
  tacet
  take its toll
  no thank you
  eat like a horse
  چھہ
  червь
  sum of its parts
  uninvited
  gender-neutral
  classique
  carhouse
  turn the tide
  chicken-or-egg question
  cornus
  Bereshit
  -to
  code point
  Sukhumi
  manso
  over skyerne er himlen altid blå
  regnbuefamilie
  multivarious
  Indon
  α΄
  orignal
  don't try to teach grandma how to suck eggs
  speech recognition
  hazelly
  pirmas
  ne bis in idem
  Euthemia
  otocrane
  hagdon
  caviar to the general
  lipsati
  native bread
  RGSS
  arena rock
  pasar por las horcas caudinas
  one over the eight
  rhina
  Wesson
  smuggling raisins
  monolid
  ကာလယဲ
  smeť
  search up
  war hero
  war-hero
  watercressing
  green privilege
  Chinese landing
  Dağ Türkleri
  one's heart bleeds
  phrogging
  ၐြဳ
  one's house in order
  efilism
  mukt
  tjälknöl
  radiendocrinology
  lightning bruiser
  Jacboson
  Andersdr
  on someone's ass
  churtle
  Lipović
  dunnarf
  Єфінгар
  Ефингар
  unprovenienced
  quirinalis
  

February 2025

"pumpkin" in the Cinderella sense, applied to machines, etc?

I've noticed that YouTuber Cathode Ray Dude recently has been using the term "pumpkin" in the sense of "if you remove/lose X part, the machine turns into a pumpkin". For example, at 10:54 of his "IBM's Eduquest: The Only Good 90s All-In-One" video, he says: "Now here's a fun fact, IBM's primary consumer PC line in '93 was still the PS1 series, many of which put their power supplies inside the monitor as well. But those monitors were removable, so you could lose them, and then your PC would just turn into a pumpkin." (bolded emphasis mine)

With context, "pumpkin" refers to a machine that's missing hardware that allows it to work. This probably comes from the Cinderella pumpkin carriage that turns back into a pumpkin when the magic expires.

Are there any other attested uses of "pumpkin" in this way, to mean "something that won't work if it is missing something"? Bigyihsuan (talk) 08:04, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

No doubt you're right that Cinderella's coach is the allusion in this case. When I was growing up, the jocular notion of turning into a pumpkin if one stays up way past one's bedtime was familiar. When it comes to devices lapsing into uselessness because of some flaw, the usual way to express that idea nowadays (21st c) in AmE is that the thing has bricked (v.i.), that is, has bricked itself (v.r.), because the flaw has bricked the device (v.t., d.o.). That one is usually understood as coming from the fact that a rectangular glass slab isn't anything more than a brick if it isn't going to perform its electronic duties. As for going in the opposite direction (from plain to fancy, from dirt to jewel), turning the pumpkin into the carriage would easily work as the operative allusion, but turning the frog into the prince is the one that people's minds usually reach for when expressing that concept. Quercus solaris (talk) 05:22, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Bricking has the connotation of the user doing something to the computer, or computer doing something to itself, that causes it to permanently become non-functional. This "pumpkin" sense is more the machine still works, but you're missing something that is essential for it to work at all. Bigyihsuan (talk) 20:45, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

silicon and genetic (etc) lotteries

While improving our definition of silicon lottery, I noticed that our definition of genetic lottery, and perhaps other figurative lottery terms, also seems (to me) to miss a key element: it's not merely "The uncertain nature of" the thing (as genetic lottery puts it) — many things have uncertain natures, e.g. God or (initially) a plane crash — to me, these lottery terms denote not just uncertainty, but that some people get desirable outcomes and some people get undesirable outcomes.
In silicon lottery I tried to cover that by saying "(so that, by chance, some get products that prove able to overclock better than others)", and I could add something similar to the end of the definition at genetic lottery, but I wonder if there's an even better way to formulate our definitions of these things. - -sche (discuss) 18:05, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

What comes first into my mind is "... leading to unequal outcomes". Mihia (talk) 21:41, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

violin

1. (music, metonymically) The position of a violinist in an orchestra or group.

   The first violin often plays the lead melody lines in a string quartet.

Does anyone agree/disagree that this definition is correct for the example given? Mihia (talk) 18:21, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Technically true from what I recall from band, although it's SoP. There's also "first clarinet", "first trombone", "first trumpet", etc. with a similar meaning of "A position of a [instrument]-player in a group that plays the highest notes". CitationsFreak (talk) 03:39, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Of course, there is no doubt that terms "first violin", "first clarinet" etc. exist and mean what we know them to mean. My doubt is whether the word "violin" in "first violin" itself means the "position of a violinist". To me it seems more feasible that the word "first" designates the position, and "violin" means, um, "violin" or, by association, "violinist". Perhaps this is what the alleged "metonymic" sense should be: "violin = violinist", as we see in e.g. "I'd like the violins over there and the cellos here", referring to the players. Is "violin" in "first violin" the same sense of the word as this, and nothing in itself to do with "position"? Mihia (talk) 09:27, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

You're right. The word naming the instrument refers to the instrument and, metonymically, its role in the orchestra or the musician who plays that instrument and that role. (Analogy with a base in baseball and calling a baseman a base metonymically, which sometimes occurs naturally.) The ordinal numbers then add an additional layer (of meaning) atop that, and the collocations thus formed (such as "first violin", "second violin", or "first clarinet") are almost mere SoP, although a plausible argument can be made (which I support) that first violin and second violin are worthy of entry in WT for the same reason that first baseman, second baseman, and so on are worthy: each of those positions has specific traits that allow their names to be viewed as slightly more idiomatic than mere/bare SoP alone. There's no sense carrying WT:SoP to an extreme that inaccurately denies the existence of such a flavor. The way to fix the infelicity quoted above is to stop using a mediocre choice of ux for the given headword and simply use a better-chosen ux for it. That is, use a ux that illustrates violin alone without trying to muddy the water by mixing the ordinal aspect into it, when the ordinal aspect has been viewed as worthy of its own separate headword entry. Quercus solaris (talk) 19:05, 2 February 2025 (UTC) I tweaked it there boldly to show what I mean. Quercus solaris (talk) 19:18, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Is there any benefit in retaining the word "position" at all? To me it seems to create potential for confusion without having any real purpose. Is there anything to be lost by making the definition simply "A violinist in an orchestra or group"? Mihia (talk) 20:37, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes, in precise analysis there are two meanings involved: the role or position, and the person who plays it. They can be metonymically conflated or deconflated at will, but they are not always a unity. For example, say you are Alice and your job title is Lead Analyst. Say the Lead Analyst role reports to the Associate Widget Manager role, which is currently held by Bob, your boss. People can easily use the words with varying semantic referents such that they sometimes conflate you and Bob with your jobs (roles), and they often will, and that's fine (natural), but that doesn't mean that you and Bob equal your jobs in every way — that you are always no more nor less than your jobs. And if Bob retires next Tuesday, the Lead Analyst still reports to the Associate Widget Manager, regardless; that doesn't change, even though Bob ceases to instantiate the A.W.M. role and someone else begins instantiating it. If humans want to be sane and rational about stating "all the things" explicitly, then the def line can be, "The position of a violinist in an orchestra or group; the person who holds it." Then people can say that "Lisa is the second violinist this week, and Caleb will be the second violinist next week." And in fairness, she is so, and he will be so, by any practical measure of the usual way that natural language works. It's not wrong to say it that way. Some people have experimented with ways to circumvent it (such as E-Prime), but one must work within the constraints of one's medium if one wants to bring other people along successfully (as contrasted with being an eccentric whose proposal remains a sideshow curiosity). Quercus solaris (talk) 21:10, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Substituting the "position" definition into the examples now gives "The positions of violinist come in stronger when the next movement begins" and "The positions of violinist are seated with sufficient elbow room", which don't make sense to me. What would make sense to me is "The violinists come in stronger when the next movement begins" and "The violinists are seated with sufficient elbow room". Are there examples that more feasibly illustrate the "position" sense? Mihia (talk) 18:46, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

I would like to point out that what makes the sense of "first violin", "second" violin" etc. not SoP in your view also applies to "first trombone", "second flute", "third bassoon", etc. I think that there should be a def for this sense on first (and second). CitationsFreak (talk) 01:33, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

"the first violinist" is actually already an example at first, sense "Most eminent or exalted; most excellent; chief; highest". The way to make "first violin" coincide with this would be to have "violinist" as a sense of "violin", which we do now kind of say, but in a rather roundabout way. Similarly, "Next to the first in value, power, excellence, dignity, or rank" at second would then fit "second violin". Although I seem to have been confused about this whole issue, I'm now thinking more positively that "violin = violinist" would explain all known cases of this type. Mihia (talk) 18:56, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Absolutely. And a subsense for the two defs you have with the music sense. CitationsFreak (talk) 21:43, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

If you have a piano trio instead of a string quartet, you could say "The violin often plays the lead melody lines." That's exact same usage as the quoted example. Quae legit (talk, contributions) 11:05, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

• I don't see any usage examples that need mention of "position" of violinists, only ones that mean "violinist", the person, so I have reworded it to that effect and retained examples that clearly must refer to the person and cannot refer to the instrument. Mihia (talk) 20:47, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

grip

1. (archaic except rail transport) A small travelling-bag or gripsack.

What I understand as a "grip", in the sense of a bag, is something like this. I wouldn't call it a small bag. I would say medium or medium-to-large, soft rather than hard like a (modern) suitcase, and carried with two handles. Also, the word is not "archaic" in the UK. It may have a somewhat dated feel, depending on opinion. Most modern products seem to be described as "grip bags" rather than just "grips". The fact that the definition label, though translated to "rail transport", reads "railroading" in the source shows that this definition was written by a US editor. So is this enough of a different word from mine, that is definitely a small bag and archaic in the US outside rail transport? Or is it all just the same thing really? M-W says "Suitcase", which is different again. AHD also "A suitcase or valise". Oxford Learner's says " (old-fashioned) a large soft bag, used when travelling" and Collins "a travelling bag or holdall", both of which are compatible with my understanding. Could a US editor give an opinion? Mihia (talk) 19:08, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

I feel that all of these senses (of grip for handbags or luggage or of gripsack for luggage) are now only passive vocabulary in general register in AmE, and the only AmE speakers among whom they might still be active vocabulary are some minority who have knowledge and interest in things such as handbag fashion, luggage fashion, and leather goods. Quercus solaris (talk) 04:08, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

• I think all I can do with this for now is add the meaning that I know as a separate sense. Mihia (talk) 10:03, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

ditokous

Meaning having 2 kinds of young. Can we give an example of this? I assume the difference is more than just male and female kinds 85.48.185.8 22:53, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

In the case of annelids it evidently refers to offspring from asexual reproduction versus those from sexual reproduction (w:Annelid#Reproduction_and_life_cycle). I'm going to edit the entry accordingly. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:20, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

-(s)

I believe this is normally pronounced "[noun] or [noun]s", e.g. "book(s)" → "book or books", but I'm not sure how to find a source to back that up. — W.andrea (talk) 22:07, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

seguing

I am reading a British novel, encountered the term "seguing", checked Wiktionary, and saw it listed as a misspelling. I then checked Cambridge.org [2] and saw it listed as a standard spelling. I don't normally edit Wiktionary; is there a standard way of noting this? Thanks! 100.19.66.49 00:14, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

You misread that Cambridge page. It does not list it as a standard spelling. What is seen there is just two nonstandard usage instances that were copied straight from Wikipedia, as that Cambridge page makes clear ("From Wikipedia" / "These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.") Some people mispronounce segue as /siːɡ/, which is why they write *seguing. Wiktionary could enter it as {{misspelling of}} or {{misconstruction of}}. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:38, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

PS: A curated dictionary could refrain from offering mindlessly uncurated web search results among its search results, which would be a much better choice for something that supposedly aims to be a trusted dictionary, but if it did that, then it couldn't be a web traffic vacuum for cash, so you can see the bind they're in /s. Wiktionary at least gives an honest result when someone searches for the misconstruction. Plus, it does so without blasting your eyeballs with ads, or popping intrusive ads over top of the results that you hoped to see. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:50, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Should we label example sentences in Portuguese?

I've seen many example sentences with an European Portuguese structure, using forms such as tenho a certeza de que o teria visto, instead of tenho certeza que eu teria visto ele, in coloquial Brazilian Portuguese. I found this example in por aí, an expression labeled as “informal”. The former structure would sound pretty formal in Brazil. To let clear that this sentence is informal in Portugal (and maybe in other Lusopnone countries) and not in Brazil, should we start adding lables to them too? OweOwnAwe (talk) 20:38, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Come/turn out/off badly

In Hungarian there are various expressions for having an unpleasant outcome in a situation, usually with some loss of face (ráfázik/ráfarag/megüti a bokáját/pórul jár etc.), and I want to add them to Wiktionary. I've been trying to find good English translations for them, but so far no avail. Could you please suggest me some good idiomatic expressions in English having this meaning? Drkazmer (talk) 19:10, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

We have many ways of saying this kind of thing, some of which only apply to bad outcomes tank/fail, others requiring a complement or modifier of some kind (eg, turn out + badly/well). You also have to pay attention to whether the subject is a person (also, possibly, some other animate being) or some process or event. DCDuring (talk) 19:56, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, here the subject is a person. Something like Joe suffered a loss of reputation due to the bad outcome of the event. Drkazmer (talk) 21:28, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Maybe: end in tears, go south, go Pete Tong. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:E4C0:8321:7D29:10A0 20:00, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't write that here the subject is the person, not the event. (In any case I've learnt great expressions!) Drkazmer (talk) 21:29, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

My favourite is go pear-shaped, but unfortunately this also is used about events/situations not people. Another good one, but moderately vulgar, so to be used with caution, is go tits up. Mihia (talk) 21:55, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

We already have pórul jár. See also felsül and its synonyms. Voltaigne (talk) 21:41, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, but a simple fail doesn't have the same informality as these expressions. Maybe to come to grief is something similar. Again, a sample example would be: Dezső tegnap jól ráfázott/pórul járt, kétszer is megbüntették gyorshajtásért. – Dezső came to grief (?) yesterday, he was caught for speeding twice. Drkazmer (talk) 22:44, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

In this case, Dezső copped it and came unstuck. In other situations of dismal failure to achieve something or to impress people, one can faceplant, crash and burn, go down in flames, bomb or lay an egg. Voltaigne (talk) 23:12, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Many of these necessarily don't necessarily involve a "loss of reputation", certainly not a durable one. Bomb and lay an egg, especially, but all of Voltaigne's last five have notion that the failure of one's performance leaves lasting (but possibly reparable) damage to one's reputation. DCDuring (talk) 23:47, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

I've created the entry: rábasz. If you could check the examples, I'd much appreciate it! Drkazmer (talk) 18:30, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

be

• To occupy a place.

  The cup is on the table.

Currently listed under "intransitive lexical verb" heading. To me the sole example looks copulative, which is a different section of the article. Anyone agree/disagree? Mihia (talk) 20:42, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Copulative with locative/temporal seems right to me. DCDuring (talk) 23:48, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Hmm. I'm unsure, but I think the current placement (intransitive, not copulative) may be right. It is not immediately obvious to me what would make "the book is on the table" more copulative than intransitive, can you elaborate? It seems similar to e.g. "the meeting is at six", which is AFAICT the following intransitive sense (our 3.4), and it seems dissimilar (being followed by a prepositional phrase) to all of the copulative usexes, where a noun or adjective follows ("it is a dog", "it is red", etc).
Merriam-Webster also has this sense as an intransitive verb, their sense 2b, grouped together with analogues of our other intransitive senses: MW's "2a : to have an objective existence : have reality or actuality : live : I think, therefore I am" seems to correspond to our intransitive sense 3.1, their "2c : [...] let him be" is our intransitive sense 3.2, "2d : to take place : occur : The concert was last night." is our intransitive 3.4, and "2e : to come or go : [...] has never been to the circus" is our 3.5.
The 1933 OED seems to cover this as "II. With adverb or prepositional phrase: stating where or how, i.e. in what place or state a thing is. [=Sp. Pg. estar as distinct from ser.] 5. To have or occupy a place (i.e. to sit, stand, lie, hang, etc.—the posture not being specified or regarded) somewhere, the 'where' being expressed either by an adverb or a preposition with object. Expressing the most general relation of a thing to its place: To have one's [...] substance, or presence, to be present, so as to find oneself, or to be found (in, at, or near a place, with an object, etc.). [...] Your book is there, under the table.", distinguished from sense "III. [...] copula [...] [=Sp. Pg. ser as distinct from estar.]".
- -sche (discuss) 05:23, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

I find some of the definitions confusing, but also hard to improve. Some seem to confound lexical sense with tense (2.9). 2.9 also declares itself limited to use with "since" and not other temporal prepositions like until and before/after. Others seem to make a distinction where hardly any difference exists (2.6 ex. 1 and 2.7). Most definitions relating to time (2.9-2.12) don't have sisters relating to location. Other defs seem to be UK-ish (2.10, 2.11). Def. 2.6 would seem to include measurements like elapsed time of distance or punctive time or location, but separate definitions, at least for time follow. Maybe some of the distinctions are pedagogically useful, but couldn't usage examples illustrate the different applications of the definition? DCDuring (talk) 15:47, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

• This is related to the perennial issue of the status of prepositional phrases (or single words conveying the same type of meaning) after the "be" verb. Although I may have said previously that calling these adverbial is "less wrong" than calling them adjectival, quite clearly, in my view, "The cup is on the table" does not mean "The cup is", i.e. "The cup exists", i.e. what we are calling lexical "be", with "on the table" somehow adverbially modifying the lexical verb in any standard sense. Adverbial modification of lexical "be" is unusual and distinctive, as in "Don't think about being, just spontaneously be". I think a more plausible explanation is to extend the copulative sense of "be" so as to include prepositional phrases (and single-word equivalents). Mihia (talk) 16:14, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

  I had added "or prepositional phrase" at several places in the definitions. I don't know when or why these additions were removed. DCDuring (talk) 17:04, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

  Clearly a case of "great minds think alike" ha-ha! In fact, I did not notice before, but what seems the most pertinent copulative definition, 2.4, does still say "or prepositional phrase", except that somehow the word "or" has been lost, which I will now reinstate. Mihia (talk) 18:24, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

Re "The cup is", i.e. "The cup exists", i.e. what we are calling lexical "be": wait, is the use of be to mean exist the same thing as the use of be as a lexical-not-copulative verb? Because we have "To exist" as the first copulative definition, 2.1 ("There is just one woman in town who can help us." = "There exists just one woman in town..."). And then, yes, we have "To exist" a second time as an intransitive lexical verb (3.1). It seems like the question of whether or not be means "exist" may be separate from the question of whether it's copulative or lexical...? (Also, "the cup exists on the table" is perfectly valid, if stilted; and "the cup sits on the table", etc.) BTW: we also, as an aside, have the thing we actually call "lexical be" in those exact words listed as a subsense of the copulative, not the lexical, verb: sense 2.14. I wonder if it might be best to simply remove the supposed distinction between the (empty) "copulative..." and "lexical..." supersenses, and just list everything that's currently a ##-subsense, as a #-sense...?
Do you think senses 3.4 and 3.5 are also copulative? I'm not currently seeing why sense 3.3 would be copulative if 3.4 (or 3.5) is not; "where is the cup?" "the cup is on the table" and "when is the meeting?" "the meeting is at six" seem grammatically identical. - -sche (discuss) 17:33, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

I would ideally prefer to hold on to the present three-way organisation if it can be made to work, but I do agree that there are various issues with the article in its current state (as DCD also alluded to).

I wouldn't be surprised if "there is", in the sense of existence, is an awkward case, being so idiomatic. If by origin it is an inversion of "X is there", meaning "X is in some place", then it should be equivalent to a PP usage such as "the cup is on the table", but because it has evolved so far idiomatically, it may seem to have become more "traditionally" copulative with "there" as a pseudo-subject.

Sense 3.4 example is another disguised PP, leading to e.g., as you say, "the meeting is at six". So yes, I agree, it's essentially the same question as the cup, just temporal rather than locative.

"The cup exists on the table" seems a little weird to me, or at least it's hard to imagine a context in which one would say it, but other examples may be less so, such as "His name exists on the list". I wonder whether we can make a distinction between "His name exists on the list" and "His name is on the list", in that "exists" can be separated to stand alone, while "is" can't:

His name exists -- it exists on the list.

*His name is -- it is on the list.

So if "is" (in this sense) requires the complement, but "exists" does not, then that would support the idea of "is" being copulative in these cases and "exist" intransitive. It is true that we can say "His name is on the list -- it definitely is", but then we can also say "Her eyes are blue -- they definitely are". Mihia (talk) 21:36, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

IMHO, we need to give priority to syntax (complements, etc.) whenever possible in looking at definitions of a term that is, for the most part, a syntactic term. To me, at most, only 3.1 and 3.2 are probably intransitive lexical verb definitions, the other three normally taking complements. Disclaimer: I may be missing something and haven't consulted CGEL (2005). DCDuring (talk) 22:20, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

I agree. No complement or implied complement = not copulative. Another potential candidate in block 3 may be the "postman" usage of 3.5, since it is possible to say "The postman has been" as a standalone thought. However, the definition seems to suggest that this is short for "The postman has been here". Do perceive an implied complement such as "here"? There is also the "toilet" example, whereby one could say, e.g. before setting off, "The kids have all been", but to me this is more obviously implying "been to the toilet". Mihia (talk) 17:46, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that's the weakness of relying exclusively on the presence of absence of complement. I think many of the copulative senses can be used with an "understood" complement. The same can be said of some intransitive-verb definitions where there is an "understood" pronoun complement to a transitive sense. DCDuring (talk) 18:12, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Absolutely. Hopefully we can agree that "Are her eyes blue?" "Yes, they are" is copulative, and not a separate intransitive sense, so we must allow for implied complements. Mihia (talk) 18:25, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

T-V distinction

how should the following case be handled. Wikipedia uses the en dash in place of the hyphen within the word, as it not a modifier. should the entry be moved (with a redirect made) to T-V distinction (or perhaps the other way around)? Juwan (talk) 12:23, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

I'd say have the hyphen-minus in the actual title, and have the en-dash version be the redirect. We always use the HM in English lemmas, as it's more convenient to search. CitationsFreak (talk) 17:23, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I support that direction as well, and not merely as a personal preference but rather for well-considered reasons of prevailing orthographic practice. Most dictionaries use the hyphen in such terms and treat the en dash as an accepted variant. Even Merriam-Webster explains to its users (i.e., the ones who bother to listen) that when you see what looks like an en dash in MW headwords (as judged by its length), it represents a hyphen (but has been elongated merely to emphasis/highlight that it is not a space). Another large class of examples (thousands of examples) is that most medical dictionaries use the hyphen in a headword such as Guillain-Barré syndrome; this fact does not at all mean that Wikipedia is "wrong" to use an en dash in it (Guillain–Barré syndrome), whereas instead it merely means that that's not how most of the medical literature styles it. In fact an interesting phenomenon is that medical literature today, compared with that of 20 years ago and more, is somewhat more likely to use the styling that Wikipedia uses, simply because so much of the internet is now partly influenced by Wikipedia's style choices (that is, WP:MOS) (for example, thousands of instances of people copying and pasting terms from it into their own writing, rather than retyping them). But even so, medical journals that use the style of major medical dictionaries typically use the hyphen in these terms. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:23, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

I am a stickler for preserving the distinction of the dash character -- when I can be bothered to type it! -- and it annoys me when supposedly professional writers don't understand the difference between a dash and a hyphen. However, even I struggle to care about "T-V distinction" supposedly being an en-dash and not a hyphen. I think only a vanishingly small number of English speakers would know about this. Mihia (talk) 22:41, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

humorous use of 齁 in English

I’ve seen 齁 used as a censor word of ho/hoe on YouTube, Snapchat. Pretty funny lol. Could be from rednote/小红书 HanziKanji (talk) 22:57, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

Does "jamon" constitute a false friend in English/Spanish?

The dog2 (talk • contribs) edited Appendix:False friends between English and Spanish to add the English jamon and Spanish jamón. Per my post on the user's talk page, it's not clear to me if these actually are false friends. We think that having some additional feedback would be helpful. Should jamon/jamón be included in this appendix? Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:07, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

I would expect the false friend (English word) to be ham, not jamon, due to the similarity in pronunciation between jamón and ham. Leasnam (talk) 01:55, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

There are other instances of this pattern, too, where the word's referent is at the hypernym level in one language (often the source of the word) and at the hyponym level in the other language (often the borrower of the word). For example, Spanish jamón refers to any ham, but English jamon refers more narrowly to the "ethnic" kind of ham (air quotes, /s), and Spanish salsa refers to any sauce, but English salsa refers more narrowly to the "ethnic" kind of sauce (air quotes, /s). My brain seems to remember encountering ones where French [word] refers to [hypernym], but English [loanword-from-French] refers to the "Frenchy" kind of [hypernym]. The shared cognitive underpinning is a certain kind of ignorant misconstrual connected with misplaced essentialization. "A: What do you call this delicious concoction? B: We call it 'sauce'. A: Ooh la la, I'll have to remember that when I get home — the magically ethnic stuff that I tasted when I was in France was called 'sauce'. How uniquely French! I'll call it 'sauce' back home, too, to impress my nonfrancophone friends with my worldly loanword shibboleth, and I'll stress how distinctly French 'sauce' is — a little je ne sais quoi, quintessentially French, and you'd've had to've been there yourself to be qualified to fully appreciate it." Smug misconception, misplaced ethnic essentialization. I can't remember other specific instances off the top of my head, it's been too many years. I do feel that they count as a subclass of (a type of) false friends, as contrasted with 'not' false friends. Quercus solaris (talk) 08:08, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

I would think these are true cognates but false friends, but I'm not an expert on linguistics. Italian prosciutto also is a generic word for any kind of ham, even though English speakers use it to refer only to Italian dry-cured hams. There's others with other language pairs as well. For instance икра (ikra) in Russia refers to any kind of roe, although the word borrowed into Japanese as イクラ (ikura) refers specifically to salmon roe. The dog2 (talk) 13:13, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

The situation is similar for panino/panini and salami to what it is for prosciutto. Pepperoni is also a false friend, if I may be so indulgent as to go off on a tangent slightly, as it doesn’t actually mean anything in Italian despite being derived from peperone. Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:46, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

"Using Language X's term for Y to mean X-type Y" seems to be a decently common phenomenon; e.g. wurst (shorter than German sausage), and for a non-food example, Führer vs Führer or Reich vs Reich. I guess the food words, at least, are "half-false" friends: Italian "prosciutto" and English "prosciutto" can be used of the same thing, but the Italian word can also be used of other things. Maybe we should separate these out into a separate section of the "false friends" page...? Or will that create new grey areas and problems? - -sche (discuss) 21:50, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

I will also point out that it's not exclusive to culinary terms. For instance アニメ (anime) in Japanese is just a generic term for all animated works, and it's similar for other terms like "manga" and "jidaigeki" as well. There's also some such borrowings from other Asian languages, so for instance "sageuk" in Korean is a generic term for period dramas, not specific for Korean ones, and "lakorn" in Thai refers to any kind of drama, not specifically Thai dramas. And there's something else that's not really the same but somewhat similar: in Japanese "ecchi" means sexual, and in fact, one way to say "to have sex" in Japanese is "ecchi-suru", but English speakers borrowed the word to mean "sexually suggestive but not explicit". The dog2 (talk) 02:33, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Belatedly I will add here another interesting nonculinary example. English has hypersynonymy for the concept of a ROSCA because it has borrowed the names of ROSCAs from various languages in a way where each borrowing occurred with little or no awareness of the others (which is quite natural — not an "error" but merely a fact). The various hyponyms of ROSCA in English don't necessarily denote a different concept versus the others, and they therefore could potentially be called synonyms not hyponyms, but it seems not worth the trouble to try to assert synonymy among them, because if one did so, some people would then (in response) work very hard on finding any detail about the semantic referent of any particular one (i.e., the details of its rules) to prove how special it is and to try to prove its uniqueness. What's interesting about this phenomenon is that it is a spectrum, where a legitimate need to have differentiation of terms for fine-graded differentiation of referents (part of the spectrum) coexists in some cases with an ontologically misplaced essentialization notion (another part of the spectrum), but many humans, when they are exercising the latter mental muscle, tend to tell themselves, or uncritically assume, that they are doing it for the former noble reason alone. One might respect this conflation when it is serving some useful purpose, such as a slight degree of exaggeration slash fiction in how strongly a differentiation matters (say, for example, among types of prosciutto and jamón) because hey, protected designations of origin can stave off ruinous perfect competition, and we've all gotta make a living, after all. More good than harm in net effect. But it can be annoying when it is done for basically no other reason than misplaced, inaccurate essentialization, which is the same sea of cognitive weakness that miscomprehensions like bigotry come from. But shhh, there there, egghead, no one cares tho, lol. Quercus solaris (talk) 21:44, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

ever and e'er

e'er is a contraction of "ever", but it is listed as a adverb. I mean, yes it *is* an adverb, because it represents a contraction of an adverb. But why isn't the pos Contraction? If we look at another pair of words in the same lexical ballpark, f'rever has pos Contraction, with gloss "Contraction of forever." So shouldn't e'er also have pos Contraction? And if not, why is it listed as a "comparative adverb" in the head template whereas "ever" is not? Why the discrepancy? This makes e'er a non-lemma. But the term "comparative adverb" is usually used for a form of an adverb, like manly, manlier or fast, faster. e'er is the exact same word as ever but with the v replaced with an apostrophe. So I think the "comparative adverb" argument should be removed, or e'er should be changed from Adverb to Contraction.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

- Rob Killeroonie (talk) 05:33, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

@Killeroonie: I see from WT:POS that "Contraction" is an allowed part-of-speech heading, though I'm not sure why. It seems far more useful to me to indicate that a term is a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, etc., rather than labelling it "Contraction". — Sgconlaw (talk) 11:09, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

I agree. I don't understand why we allow "contraction" as a part of speech. It isn't. The fact that it is a contraction should be explained in the definition and/or etymology. Mihia (talk) 17:51, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Hm, thinking about it some more, I suppose there is an advantage, where there are multiple PoS, and nothing to say about any of them except "contraction of X", of not having to repeat this over multiple sections (something that I also find a drag with spelling variants). Mihia (talk) 18:53, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

There are cases such as "they're" where the uncontracted form doesn't have a single POS. The hard part is allowing for those, but preventing misuse of the POS for the vast majority of cases where it's just a shortening of a term with a clear POS. All of those should be converted to alternative forms of the long version with the same POS as the long version. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:10, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

For cases such as "they're = they are" it might be better to make the "part of speech" "Fragment" rather than "Contraction". At present, it seems feasible in theory, although I haven't actually got an example, that we could have a "Contraction" section, and then other sections for specific PoS that are in fact also contractions. Mihia (talk) 19:29, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Some really good points have been made so far! So I agree that a contraction of a single word should be categorized with the same part of speech as the word it contracts. As soon as we get into multiple words, I'm out of my depth as I'm not a lexicographer and there might already be many papers written on that subject. But I do agree that the Contraction pos would be well suited for a case like "they're." I just think if you do that, maybe you need to create a multi word entry for "they are" that the Contraction becomes an alt form of? At least certainly for the most common multi word contractions like "they're", "we're", "don't", "it's" etc. Currently, the contraction "they're" references "they" and "are" as two separate words. That's probably a good solution.

As to the specific word "e'er", it has a rich documented history of poetic use so I'd suggest it's a lemma as well as being a contraction of "ever." For "e'er", I would like to :

1. Treat it as the same pos as its referent, in this case "ever."

2. Indicate that it is a contraction of "ever".

3. Treat it like a lemma.

• I just did some checking, having an "alt of" section does NOT make it a non-lemma. "e'er" was previously a non-lemma because it had been tagged "comparative adverb" in the header template. I just changed this to align with "ever" and now "e'er" is being treated as a lemma. (I think the "comparative adverb" tag was used incorrectly because although the word ends in -er, it's clearly NOT a comparative adverb.

So I've fixed "e'er" in line with making it a lemma, which was my main issue. I will now check how many single word contractions have POS "Contraction" to see how many need to be changed. I won't change any multi-word contractions yet.

- Rob Killeroonie (talk) 22:36, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

There are about 848 English entries labeled as "Contraction" for part of speech. The vast majority of this list are multi word contractions.... which just made me remember... this is what a contraction is. At least that is what I learned at school. Dropping letters in a single word and replacing them with an apostrophe is actually a non-standard case used mainly in poetry and I don't ever remembering learning a specific term for that form of contraction. So I think that any single words labeled as contractions are incorrectly labeled, and since these are in the minority I don't think it represents a major change to fix them all.

Killeroonie (talk) 23:28, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

I updated all single words that previously had part of speech as "Contraction," except for th'. "th'" can be a contraction form of 3 different words (the, thou, there), each with multiple parts of speech, so I thought I would be unnecessarily complicating things rather than simplifying them. Although, from the viewpoint of a machine readable data organization, these entries should be split up according to pos. From the viewpoint of a human reading a dictionary page, I think the current entry is cleaner. Killeroonie (talk) 04:51, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz, Killeroonie, Mihia: for contractions which are multiword and do not belong to a single part of speech, maybe we should use “Phrase” and retire “Contraction”. — Sgconlaw (talk) 05:19, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

There's already a pos code for "phrase", for entries like each_to_their_own. I don't think that would apply to something like "they're." When we write "they're", we know we can substitute "they are". So "they're" doesn't have a single part of speech. It has to be decoded into its constituent parts. We call this a "contraction." It's well known, so I don't think it would make sense to change this well known concept and rename it to "phrase", which really means a different thing than "contraction."

I see that pure verb contractions like don't, won't, can't and others are entered as Verbs, since they do represent verbs (or verb negations): do not, will not, can not (cannot), etc. Killeroonie (talk) 05:53, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

I question whether "they are" or "they're" is truly a "phrase". I think of a "phrase" as something expressing a complete idea, or having a complete meaning in itself. As far as I am aware, combinations of words that do not function as a complete unit of meaning or part of speech are usually termed "fragments". However, if people don't like "fragment", then "phrase" seems better than "contraction". It seems illogical to classify some contractions under a true part of speech such as "adverb", or whatever, and others, such as "they're", under "contraction", which has nothing to do with parts of speech or anything related to that. Instead, we should should look for the "closest thing" to a part of speech to describe "they're" and use that. Mihia (talk) 11:00, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

@Mihia: that was my line of thinking. I might note that the OED lumps a lot of different terms ("fragments", proverbs, etc.) under "Phrases" (though of course we aren't bound to follow). However, from a quick check, it doesn't appear that the OED even has entries for they're, we're, and so on. — Sgconlaw (talk) 11:13, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

I haven't been able to think of any better term. In the absence of any better suggestions, I would support calling it a "phrase". Mihia (talk) 20:32, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

I don't think "they're" falls under either the colloquial or technical definitions of the word "phrase". In linguistics, a phrase is a constituent, not just any sequence of words.--Urszag (talk) 20:43, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

Do you know a better term that we could use? Mihia (talk) 20:44, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

I really do not see the value in merging contractions with phrases. They seem like two distinct things to me, and both are well known terms in linguistics. I think it would be confusing to rename something everyone has learned as "contraction" to "phrase" instead. A phrase in this wiktionary are multiple words that combine to form a meaning that may sometimes be different than the individual words would suggest. e.g. "life goes on." Whereas a contraction is just a sequence of (usually) two words that occur often enough that we develop a shorthand for that word combination. I think "contraction" perfectly describes this. Keep in mind I'm referring to multiple word contractions. If there is a single word, I don't see value in referring to it as a contraction instead of the pos of the word's non-contracted form(s). Killeroonie (talk) 21:04, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Although I previously said I'd support it in the absence of anything better, I've actually gone off the idea of "phrase" for items such as "they're" = "they are". I wish we had a good PoS "equivalent" for such items -- I mean a term of broadly the same kind of nature as a PoS, which "contraction" isn't -- but I can't think of anything. Mihia (talk) 22:04, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

My initial reaction would be to leave "contraction" as the header for things like we're, and treat it as an ongoing maintenance task to clean up single-POS contractions like "e'er" to use the appropriate more specific POS, but I admit it's suboptimal to have an ongoing maintenance task ("have a header for they're, which people will be tempted to misuse for e'er") if we could think of some way to clean things up once and for all to some header people wouldn't misuse. But adding a new POS header "fragment" which is probably unfamiliar to people seems like it'd be confusing, and people would end up putting things under it that we might not want under it, but which they could understandably think belonged under it, e.g. certain combining forms. "Phrase" seems suboptimal for reasons others outlined above, but I notice that we do already call some other single words phrases (awkwardly, IMO), like &c, 3R, 93 (we indeed specifically got rid of the "abbreviation" and "acronym" headers some such entries had originally used). Meh. We have ty (“thank you”) as an interjection, don't have lg (“let's go”) at all, and have i.e. (which is at least etymologically an analogue of it's) as an "adverb"... hrm... - -sche (discuss) 22:17, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

I've already cleaned up all the single word "contractions" except for th'. (See the discussion page there. Someone else edited it to have the sense of "contraction for 'the'" moved to a different part of speech, but now the Pronoun entry is wrong for "there." I messaged the editor but haven't heard back. ) (Edit: based on the quotation for "there" it is being used as a pronoun. My point is that "th'" could be used as "there" for parts of speech other than Pronoun.)Killeroonie (talk) 05:13, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

beaver

Etymologies 4 and 5, which have no etymological content, seem to exist only to downplay the "vulgar" definitions placed thereunder. Am I missing some legitimate reason why those definitions shouldn't be under Etymology 1? I bring the matter here rather than to WT:ES because that forum doesn't usually treat sense evolution. DCDuring (talk) 16:04, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

• The senses were split in Special:Diff/69892654. Senses 4 and 5 should be merged back into 1. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 22:28, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

I see that Etymonline does give these senses separate sections, but it says the pubic hair sense is ultimately from the animal sense, so it seems like we could indeed just explain the semantic evolution under one etymology section. Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com put the pubic hair and animal senses in the same etymology section. - -sche (discuss) 23:01, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

In agreement with both of you, I've remerged them. Please make any further changes which are necessary. I added a note about the semantic evolution, although it could be improved (perhaps reordered so it flows in the other direction, "original meaning → derived meaning → next derived meaning"). - -sche (discuss) 20:39, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

may

In w:en:Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2025 February 10#Template:Local file @DMacks said this about the word "may" that made me think:
Doesn't the word "may" simply state a possibility (and therefore the opposite is also possible), as opposed to the definitely-true word "is"?
It absolutely can, but is there also another meaning? For example: "[McFly] Look Mr. Strickland, I passed the exam! [Strickland] You may have passed the exam McFly, but you're still a slacker." In this example, Strickland doesn't really question whether McFly passed the exam or not, he just says it doesn't really matter. Or "You may have won this round Ultraman, but next time I'll make you pay!" doesn't really question who won the current round, it just says that in the end it won't matter.
But is this actually a different sense? And if so, how could it be worded? — Alexis Jazz (talk) 07:20, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

• Yup, you're right, it's a different sense: the one that invokes subjunctive mood. Thus:
  • As for exposition showing why and how that's true, the following: Be he live or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread. Which is to say, He may be alive or he may be dead, but either way I'll grind his bones to make my bread. Which entails semantically by corollary that even if he be alive, I'll [ditto]. Which entails semantically by corollary that even in the case where his living status is assuredly ascertained, I'll [ditto]. Thus, Even though he is alive, I'll [ditto], which is to say, He may be alive, but I'll [ditto], which is also to say that even if I grant that he be alive, and even though (or even when) I grant [i.e., I do grant] that he is alive, I'll [ditto].
  • As for how to codify these facts into the defs: I checked AHD and MWU to see how they do it, and I found that they fail to do it. I skimmed in OED and saw some phrases concerning "the admissibility of a supposition", which is in the same neighborhood semantically. It is a sensible way to express the notion. Wiktionary might want to end up with a def line that says something about "granting the admissibility of a supposition", or something similar. TBD. Quercus solaris (talk) 21:31, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
    • I boldly edited accordingly, with usexes. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:40, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

peste

The word peste exists in multiple languages, but I'm specifically referring to the one in French. I have provided quotations (taken directly from the French wiktionary entry for this word) that use it, which is an old interjection that was especially used in the 19th century, but I can't properly translate them into English myself. Are there any native French speakers who can take a look and translate them into English? OldFortress (talk) 10:50, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Glossary edit request

Please change

Appendix:Glossary#clipping differs from abbreviation, which shortens the written—rather than spoken—form of a word or phrase

to something like

Compare abbreviation, which shortens the written form of a word or phrase but may or may not affect the spoken form.

• doc/doctor/Dr
• Doctor of Philosophy/PhD

Wishing everyone safe, happy, productive editing.

--173.67.42.107 22:11, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

bow up

Nice expression. How would one pronounce it? bow as in curtsey, tie, or (unlikely) ship place? Father of minus 2 (talk) 11:01, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

I checked on YouGlish and it is 'boh up' (like a bow tie) not 'baow up' (like a curtsey, or part of a ship). It's surprising, I'd've thought the etymology was that it came about as an antonym to bow down, but that's definitely the case. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:20, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. I think we're missing a sense, to tie up in a bow. At least, I've used "bow up your hair" in casual convo. Father of minus 2 (talk) 12:02, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Garbled

I'm looking for an English translation of the Hungarian adjective nehézkes. When talking about written style, it is the opposite of eloquent, that is hard to understand, clumsy, lacking a flow, often fragmentary. Is garbled used in this sense? Is clumsy something similar? (And isn't it a bit informal?) Drkazmer (talk) 14:19, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Inelegant and difficult prose style can be described as clumsy or clunky. There's also a decent number of search hits for "ungainly prose." A message is garbled if its meaning is obscured by incoherent or jumbled wording. Voltaigne (talk) 14:31, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you (again) for your quick help! I suppose ungainly is what I'm looking for. Am I correct that garbled has a more literal than figurative meaning, i.e. if I cannot read the characters of a message and similar? Drkazmer (talk) 14:37, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

A few suggestions - there are various collocation dictionaries on the Internet that likely would list some options. A last-ditch resort would be {{rfeq}}. As to the literal meaning, not necessarily, it can also refer to incoherence. Vininn126 (talk) 14:56, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

troubador

Does anyone have an opinion as to whether this is an alternative spelling or a misspelling? Or do opinions vary? Mihia (talk) 00:05, 13 February 2025 (UTC)

I think of it as a pronunciation spelling, closer to the usual English (at least US) pronunciation. DCDuring (talk) 20:19, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

FWIW, at its peak it was 1/10th as common as the usual spelling: [3]. - -sche (discuss) 22:58, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

praline

Wikipedia distinguishes between chocolate praline and praline (nut confection). We only seem to have the latter sense. I'm not sure the confections on the photo at "praline" would even be called "pralines" in all European languages. At least in German what you normally think of when you hear the word is the "chocolate praline" kind. Apparently the same is true for Dutch praline. So we need the second sense in English and a check of the translations. 2.201.0.109 17:49, 13 February 2025 (UTC)

We apparently also need a new entry for chocolate praline. I note that none of the references at “praline”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. has a definition that includes a "chocolate praline" definition, though some have a definition for praline as a filling for a confection can be of chocolate. There's also a Louisiana version of the praline filling that uses only pecans. DCDuring (talk) 19:20, 13 February 2025 (UTC)

ahh or -ahh (for ass)?

What's our policy on where to put things that can be argued to be affixes but that are normally spelled with a space? @Theknightwho, I'm confused about why it's better to put the adjective intensifier at the latter rather than the former, since none of the quotations use a spelling with a hyphen, and when I Google terms it appears to me that open spellings predominate. Urszag (talk) 16:49, 15 February 2025 (UTC)

ἄλφα and βῆτα as Ancient Greek adjectives

New POS sections were added to these entries consisting of:

===Adjective===

# [[first]]

and

===Adjective===

# [[second]]

This is wrong, but I'm at a loss as to how best to fix them. First of all, there's the matter of whether the spelled-out version is used rather than either the uppercase Α/Β or lowercase α/β in numeric senses. Then there's the question of whether use use as an ordinal makes it an adjective (Ancient Greek α (a)/Ancient Greek Α (A) and β (b)/Β (B) have nothing like that, and the famous Bible verse translated as "I am the Alpha and Omega" uses it as a noun). Finally, there's the question of inflection: do they take endings to agree with the words they modify in gender, number and case like other Ancient Greek adjectives? Chuck Entz (talk) 02:23, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

less than ...

We don't have an entry at less-than or less-than- and I'm not sure what we have at less than quite covers the informal usage to mean, generally, "poor" or below some standard or not reaching the level described by the following word, e.g. in constructions like "less-than-ideal conditions", "less than stellar driving", etc. Hyphenation seems to vary. Thryduulf (talk) 15:49, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Hardly unique: GBooks found me "a more than wicked irony" for example. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:7D43:D2B0:FE09:EE93 15:55, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I think that the "less than ideal" (I suppose also "less than three pounds") kinds of uses should ideally be mentioned somehow as "&lit" at less than, according to our usual practice of listing literal/SoP uses alongside special uses. I'm not very familiar with the adjective sense that we list. However, it is labelled "predicative", and there is a slightly over-elaborate usage note emphasising that it "can never be used attributively" etc., yet two of the usage examples ("less-than feelings" and "less than looks") are attributive, so I suppose that stuff is just wrong? Mihia (talk) 21:04, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

pot, shot

User:Nardog insists on not listing /ɔ/ alongside /ɑ/ at these pages claiming that they are not phonemic, despite the caught-cot merger not being Pan-American. Input requested to avoid edit warring. Vininn126 (talk) 18:04, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I'm at a complete loss as to why you seem to think I'm imposing the caught–cot merger on the entirety of GA by not transcribing LOT words with /ɔ/, which represents THOUGHT without the merger. We should of course indicate both possibilities for THOUGHT words, but neither we nor any dictionary do so for LOT because /ɑ/ already represents (PALM–)LOT for accents without the merger and (PALM–)LOT–THOUGHT for accents with it. Nardog (talk) 18:09, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Plenty of American accents do not have the merger, which means we shouldn't remove the vowel? Better labels would be preferred. Vininn126 (talk) 18:10, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

/ɔ/ doesn't represent LOT for accents without the merger. It represents THOUGHT. Nardog (talk) 18:23, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

North American accents without the caught-cot merger typically have /ɔ/ in "caught" and /ɑ/ in "cot", "lot", "pot, "shot", so it really isn't adequate to just refer to "the caught-cot merger not being Pan-American" as a reason for transcribing the latter set of words with /ɔ/. The use of /ɑ/ in North American accents in words like "pot" and "shot" is a consequence of the much more widespread "father–bother merger".

There are actually a few North American accents that have a vowel that could be transcribed as /ɔ/ for LOT. Wikipedia mentions "northeastern New England" as a region where some speakers might pronounce cot and caught as [kɒt] versus cart as [kät]. I don't know if there's a short designation for this feature; it is not part of so-called "General American" (a term that people like John Wells use to refer to a very specific reference accent; but I don't think "GA" in this narrow sense is the only thing that we should transcribe under the label (US)). I don't think this feature is something that is usefully described by adding individual transcriptions with /ɔ/ on the pages of every affected word. I'm not familiar with any traditional/print English dictionary that gives transcriptions based on this kind of accent.--Urszag (talk) 18:13, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Vininn126, could you give some context about why you want to include these transcriptions? Are you an unmerged speaker who has these pronunciations as a feature of your accent? Or are you a merged speaker?--Urszag (talk) 18:25, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I actually generally have cot-caught, however, I find the removal of it outright to be overgeneralizing. Perhaps whether it's part of "GA" (which I also find contentious) is another thing, but to remove it is also to ignore many important accents. Vininn126 (talk) 18:27, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

If you're a merged speaker and aren't basing this on personal observation of these pronunciations, it seems like you might have just misunderstood what the cot-caught merger involves. As Nardog said, lacking the merger does not mean that speakers pronounce LOT as /ɔ/; it means that they pronounce THOUGHT as /ɔ/. Pronouncing LOT as /ɔ/ is not to my knowledge a feature of "many important accents" in North American English; it's a feature of some very regionally restricted documented accents (possibly also some additional undocumented/poorly documented ones).--Urszag (talk) 18:36, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

As others said, it's thought (not lot) words that are typically analysed as /ɔ/ in unmerged GenAm; lot is AFAIK typically analysed as /ɑ/ regardless of the merger... but there are northern accents that merge thought and lot to [ɒ], which someone might parse as /ɔ/, and though I've yet to see it discussed in literature (and so wouldn't add it to Wiktionary), I have heard some Americans use a different vowel in lot, electron, etc than father (and sometimes it's also different from pawn).
My hypotheses are: (1) spelling pronunciation, words with o may seem like they should have /ɔ/ or ɒ, (2) speakers may learn particular words via media, from an actor etc who pronounced them with merged /ɑ/ (so the speaker learned the word with /ɑ/ even though their native accent would say /ɔ/), or with a northeastern merger outcome — or British pronunciation — of ɒ (so the speaker learns /ɔ/ or even ɒ, for a word their native accent would've been expected to say with /ɑ/), or (3) maybe some Americans, through preservation or through learning a Transatlantic/Midatlantic pronunciation from media, have a three-way /ɑ/-/ɔ/-/ɒ/ distinction similar to the UK?? (But again, I'm not suggesting to include that in Wiktionary unless reference works describe it.) - -sche (discuss) 20:28, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

A lot of the confusion no doubt comes about from the bizarre long-standing convention that in RP people say COT as /cɔt/ and CAUGHT as /cɔːt/ when in fact they say CAUGHT as /coːt/. This leads to confusion about what /ɔ/ is actually supposed to sound like which muddies the waters of converstions about the COT/CAUGHT merger and other related linguistic phenomena. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 21:02, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

We owe the choice of the symbols ⟨ɒ⟩ and ⟨ɔː⟩ to Daniel Jones, who chose them according to the general pronunciation at the time. Today ⟨ɔ⟩ and ⟨oː⟩ would indeed be more generally accurate, at least in the southeast.

Personally I would support such a change, but counter-arguments like this can be made:

• Pronunciations like [ɒ] and [ɔː] do still exist
• Phonetic accuracy isn’t the purpose of a phonemic representation
• Switching to ⟨ɔ⟩ and ⟨oː⟩ would put us at odds with every major dictionary (that I know of)
• Doing so may open Pandora’s Box

Nicodene (talk) 19:54, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Note for abbreviations

I wish to request a usage note or other way to note this use-case that seems particularly common: some abbreviations, such as streets or titles, are only used when attached to a longer name, as in you would commonly say "Main St." but not "go left on the St. over here"; "Dr. Smith" but not "the Dr. is here". would it be wanted to note this somehow? Juwan (talk) 00:38, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

@JnpoJuwan A qualifier {{lb|en|only in proper names}} perhaps? This, that and the other (talk) 23:20, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

@This, that and the other I would like that. Juwan (talk) 23:30, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

filefish and filetail

Looking at these fish, I'm assuming they're so-called coz of the tool. But I'm not 100% convinced. Can someone please give a second opinion? Father of minus 2 (talk) 10:53, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia claims that w:Filetail catsharks are so-called due to their rough tails and the image at w:Filetail fanskate looks like it has a grooved tail, so I’d agree with you. Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:23, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

w:Filefish should help. Fish of many species in that family have rough skin. As with many such vernacular names entries these would benefit from images, usually copiously available from Commons. I always thought it would be easy fun to add such explanatory images. DCDuring (talk) 16:22, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

'fifteen' POS 'Numeral', inconsistencies?

A word like fifteen has a part of speech "Numeral." Should it though? 'fifteen' is a noun, and it represents a number. Just like 'sparrow' is a noun that represents a particular kind of flappy thing with wings. But we don't say 'sparrow' has part of speech "bird." Why are words that represent numbers using a category type instead of pos class? And why the inconsistency between ordinal and cardinal numbers? They are both numbers. But "fifteen" is labeled pos Numeral and 15th is labeled Adjective. Why is the misspelling of "googol" (gogol) labeled as a Noun and the correct spelling labeled a Numeral? Wearing my newbie and non-lexicographer/non-grammarian hat, it seems to me that "fifteen" and "googol" are nouns and "fifteenth" is an adjective and "15" and "15th" and "XV" and 10^100 are numbers.

But I am aware of my ignorance in these matters, so perhaps someone can enlighten me as to why we categorize noun numbers with a "Numeral" part of speech but Adjectival forms of numbers are just Adjectives? Why isn't "fifteen" just a Noun?

Thanks! Killeroonie (talk) 23:55, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

See Numeral (linguistics). J3133 (talk) 08:55, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

workstream

This page just failed RFV under its one oddly specific definition. I'd rather not delete it when I know the term exists, so would someone like to take a crack at redefining it? Ultimateria (talk) 02:07, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

 Done. It has 3 citations now. Quercus solaris (talk) 05:24, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

• Thanks to those concerned. As the nominator, I meant to get back to this, as clearly the term exists in some sense, but probably forgot, and RFVE being virtually unusable for me doesn't help either, and certainly doesn't encourage one to visit the page and try to close or resolve issues, thus making the size problem even worse. I think this issue probably should be escalated now, unless I am alone in having such tremendous problems. Mihia (talk) 20:45, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

dura lex, sed lex

Why is this 'word' included? It is exactly the sum of its parts, no? NS1729 (talk) 05:27, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I suspect that if one were to analyze the entries for many proverbs in many languages, including Latin proverbs, one might find that even ones with minimal idiomaticity, in the sense of non–etymonically detectable meaning, are treated as squeaking under the wire of WT:CFI § Proverbs because of their proverbial status alone. Which to me seems wiser than the alternative. Plus, any proverb has WT:THUB potential. Quercus solaris (talk) 05:41, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

Speaking of minimal idiomaticity Nicodene (talk) 19:15, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

ذكري audio

Is the audio for ذَكَرِيّ (ḏakariyy) correct? Was it meant for ذِكْرَى (ḏikrā)? Vox Sciurorum (talk) 16:38, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

No. Yes. I have moved it. Fay Freak (talk) 16:58, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

pony fucker

There's something not right with this entry. Firstly, definition is Someone alleged to afford indulging bestiality with horses. I dislike the "alleged", first as being weaselly, as well as "afford indulging bestiality" (who would say such a phrase for sex???). Secondly, the comment [Pornographic picture omitted]: did Wiktionary remove the porno? Or Reddit? Does it matter? Thirdly, is the term "ponyfucker" actually a class slur? Finally, I'm pissed off at having wasted 10 minutes of my life talking about ponyfuckers on Wiktionary. Father of minus 2 (talk) 10:42, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

It is epic that I have managed to troll WF, by having him talk about ponyfuckers, without even requesting a pronunciation; imagine our readers. Mostly it is just synonymous to brony. Not in the episode of The Thick of It however, where it is somebody from the British upper classes possibly or actually engaged in equestrianism. [Pornographic picture omitted], while potentially serving as a warning to attentive readers who otherwise click on links too fast, means that the image supports the meaning; at other occasions I write about the disambiguating gestures a rapper makes. Fay Freak (talk) 11:03, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Fixed the definitely wrong and broken grammar (it's called babuism). 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:94A1:F093:C692:AC1C 21:49, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

@2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:94A1:F093:C692:AC1C: You are a funster. Are bronies really alleged to have sex with horses, however, or only to fancy it? Like autochorissexuals. Fay Freak (talk) 23:03, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

They engage in the active of autoeroticism with illustrated depictions of the equine form. CitationsFreak (talk) 06:33, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

@CitationsFreak: Thanks for your fix. You are intelligent. There is also something general about the second element of the word. There are corners of the internet where a known breed of people is called train fuckers – I forgot the real terms for them, which is why I have omitted its creation. Fay Freak (talk) 06:56, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

literally

The usage notes at literally imply that use as an intensifier is acceptable in formal, written English, and that only a "minority opinion" believes otherwise. As far as I can tell, this is intended to include both intensification of definitely non-literal statements, such as "she literally broke his heart" and intensification of word-for-word statements such as "I had no idea, so I was literally guessing". To me, the latter is informal only, while the former is an often hilarious error. Does anyone agree or disagree that mine is a "minority opinion" as far as modern English is concerned? Mihia (talk) 18:32, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

Pretty sure this was attempting to denote that it's often proscribed. Vininn126 (talk) 18:57, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

To me, the whole tone of the usage note seems to be condoning the usage in the face of unwarranted "complaints", dismissing "many grammarians" as a "minority opinion", and stating that this usage is "common [...] in written, formal English", which I question. Mihia (talk) 19:37, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

I would mostly mark the usage as colloquial and sometimes proscribed and leave it at that. Vininn126 (talk) 20:27, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

Error is such a hard, judgmental term. DCDuring (talk) 21:46, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

You don't find "On 9/11 people were literally glued to their TV sets" a hilarious error then? Mihia (talk) 21:49, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

That comes across very prescriptive. Vininn126 (talk) 21:55, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I'm not proposing actually writing those words in the Wiktionary entry! No, the fact that the existing Usage Note faintly smacks of a POV crusade is part of my complaint. Mihia (talk) 21:59, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

I'd agree it needs some changing, or sourcing. Vininn126 (talk) 22:07, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

I agree with the directional thrust of all of these comments. I boldly improved it. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:17, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

I notice that it still says "Despite popular perception, the use of 'literally' as an intensifier does not mean 'figuratively' and is not a contronym" (strictly this sentence does not work because it is not the use of the word that does or does not mean a synonym, but let's pass over that for now). In other words, it is saying, I suppose, that there is a popular perception that e.g. "She literally broke his heart" means "She figuratively broke his heart". But is this really true? Somehow I doubt it. Mihia (talk) 18:25, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I suspect that literally is used by most English speakers in its an intensifier senses more often than in all other senses. Its presence seems to almost be a good test of the idiomaticity of a following multi-word expression. DCDuring (talk) 20:24, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I would also say that I do not think it is used to mean "figuratively", but rather to intensify. Somewhat as a discourse particle. Vininn126 (talk) 20:26, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I got rid of that sentence. I don't think it's likely to be true. As you say, people use "literally" just as an intensifier, I would say without knowing/caring if they are using it with a non-literal expression. Mihia (talk) 20:56, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

fiddlesticks

1. (euphemistic) Nonsense! Expresses dismissal or disdain.

   Fiddlesticks! It's nothing but smoke and mirrors!

2. (euphemistic) Darn! Expresses mild dismay or annoyance.

   Oh, fiddlesticks! I locked my keys in the car.

I can't find mention that the original meaning was euphemistic. My assumption therefore is that there has been some degree of reinterpretation as a euphemism for 'fuck'. This fits the sense 2 example, but hardly sense 1, not in my way of speech. So is sense 1 actually euphemistic, and if so, for what? Mihia (talk) 21:48, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

Actually, having just written that, I now just found a suggestion "It took on a humorous slant as a word one could use to replace another in a contemptuous response to a remark." So perhaps there are two levels of euphemism: the "any word" one, such as "damn", "nonsense" etc. and the specific "fuck", which I would specifically think of today. Mihia (talk) 21:56, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

harvestman

Etymology section. This screen-filling etymology is concerned with speculation concerning a single sense of the term. It seems worth having, but it also seems too speculative to merit the space it consumes. Formerly, it was expedient to use {{rel-top}} or {{der-top}} (I don't remember which.) to put such content under a bar bearing a phrase that described what lurked beneath. Is there a non-deprecated template to accomplish this? DCDuring (talk) 15:56, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

@DCDuring: {{box}} is used in some entries (e.g., -ate § Etymology 2). J3133 (talk) 18:27, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Is {{box}} what you are looking for? Mihia (talk) 18:29, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes, thanks. I thereby got to Category:Collapsible box templates. I just didn't think to search for "collapsible" in template or category space. DCDuring (talk) 19:20, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Juliet#Trivia

Should we have "Trivia" sections? Mihia (talk) 18:09, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

@Mihia: no strong feelings either way, but it is a useful place to park facts like "this is the shortest word in the English language containing all the vowels A, E, I, O, U, and Y" as there is no other obvious section to put them in. However, I think we should insist that (1) the trivia must be some unusual fact about the term itself, not the thing to which the term refers (for example, that euouae is the longest word in the English language which is made up of nothing but vowels, but not that the earliest euouaes date from the 6th century [I made this up]), and (2) anything in this section must be referenced. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:37, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

I buy that, with Sgconlaw's good suggestions for requirements. I tried to sell myself opposing arguments, but Sgconlaw's suggested requirements seem to handle them well. Quercus solaris (talk) 20:10, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

Funnily enough, just the other day, noting that scintillescent has seven pairs of letters, I wondered whether this would be suitable for mention at the Wiktionary article. Then it occurred to me that the people (probably) most interested to know this would go a lifetime before they alighted at scintillescent to discover it, and it would be more helpful to collect these "fun facts" all together in one place. Mihia (talk) 20:30, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

Quite right, although that isn't necessarily a reason not to capture the data at the headword's entry, versus in a separate list. The list assembly and presentation could be dynamic instead. This is just yet another avatar of the separation of content and presentation: it's fine, and even preferable, to normalize the data to whichever locations make the most sense for data normalization (such as prevention of content forking) and then call them and recombine them, as well as filter and re-sort them, dynamically and at one's leisure. In other words, the very notion of table and query design in RDBMS use. In this particular case, if Trivia sections were to exist, then there could be a category for them, and people could go to the category to see the list, which sends them, via hyperlinks, to the instances (list items). In other words, another animal of the same parent taxon as Wiktionary:Hall of Fame, but a true category instead, and a bit more mainspacey (for WT's audience) rather than just WT inside baseball. I've grown tetchy about "separate" lists only because in my work life I deal with too many people who fail repeatedly to grok this concept (and the corporate executives who inveterately underfund things, thereby allowing such centers of nonexcellence, so to speak, to persist for too many years on end). I myself am not a developer with the stack of skills to implement such things (alas), but I well recognize the value of the things and am very grateful to those who implement them. Quercus solaris (talk) 20:55, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

I think it would become frustrating and tiresome to have to individually click on word after word in a category list in order to discover what fun fact we had for that word. Yes, the information could be stripped out of articles and consolidated automatically, if anyone ever had the time and motivation to write a program to do this. We might be waiting a while for that though. Mihia (talk) 19:39, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Currently I use trivia to list frequency information from a frequency dictionary in Polish. I would be be fine if we had a different section. I know that "Statistics" has been a frequent unofficial heading for a while. As to other trivia, not sure. We would definitely want to place limitations on what trivia can be displayed. Vininn126 (talk) 10:41, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

I don't like Trivia sections because they attract rubbish, but in past discussions it's been impossible to reach consensus to get rid of them entirely, because they also provide repositories for some things people find useful. IMO this particular Trivia section in Juliet should be removed, because it doesn't seem relevant to the word.
Re scintillescent, maybe a WT:HOF section for "words consisting of the most pairs of letters"? If nothing else you could put in on the HOF talk page, which is where I've put things like "most contranymic". - -sche (discuss) 19:29, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

There are lots of these letter-based fun facts: letters in alphabetical order, reverse alphabetical order, most vowels/consonants, fewest vowels/consonants, etc., limited only by the imagination really. I suppose these could all go into one section at WT:HOF. By the way, do you know how the lists at WT:HOF are maintained? The ones that can change over time, I mean. Does someone have a process that they run every so often? Mihia (talk) 19:47, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

For example, the longest English word with letters in alphabetical order is usually said to be Aegilops (uniquely), but, guess what, we have another one of the same length, affinors, apparently previously unknown to word puzzle enthusiasts! This is the kind of exciting stuff that we could be sharing with our readership! Mihia (talk) 22:06, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

@Mihia: facts like these could be featured on the English Wiktionary's experimental Bluesky account created by @Vininn126: see the discussion at "Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Social media account". — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:14, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

That could be one use for the accounts. Vininn126 (talk) 08:31, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

As far as I know, the lists are all manual: someone has to notice, or at least think to search the database for, candidates. This is suboptimal, obviously, and if anyone wants to write and share code that anyone could use to search a database dump, query Quarry, etc, to update the lists, that'd be great. The lists also depend on what has been entered into Wiktionary: recently someone remarked that it seemed implausible that "soap" had more borrowing-descendants than "tea", but this is probably just due to which one's descendants have been most thoroughly entered into Wiktionary so far. - -sche (discuss) 23:59, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

jedziemy z tym koksem

The use of this this idiomatic expression is not just limited to 1st person plural; forms for all persons (in present tense) are attested in the corpus and are frequently used in spoken Polish. I suggest creating an entry jechać z tym koksem, alternatively jechać z koksem and include a link to jechać in the conjugation section, similarly to iść w cholerę, jechać po bandzie, etc. JimiY☽ru 07:54, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

800000th English lemma

It was Matagok I think 115.188.108.84 09:51, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

I'd be more impressed if I didn't feel that we have many thousands of bad entries, among the hundreds of thousands of uncited ones. DCDuring (talk) 15:53, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

Boo at @DCDuring, you grumpy old thing! Have a celebratory pint of something Father of minus 2 (talk) 21:43, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I am grumpy about quality. If we take out just synonym and stub English entries, let alone the ones with vacuous definitions what would we be left with: 600,000? A hefty number, of course. It would be nice to do some analysis of the composition of the total: gazeteer entries; vernacular names of organisms ending in "id", "ine", etc. and those never appearing in running text; synonym-only lemmas; entries with only rare, obsolete, archaic, and dated definitions. If we sampled 1,000 entries from MW3 or the OED, what percentage would we cover? How would we do on readily measurable quality? I would raise a toast, no: I'd buy a round, if our coverage was more than 90%. DCDuring (talk) 23:03, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Yeh, but we're still the best completely-amateur non-slang dictionary ever made. No one else has an entry for purple monkey dishwasher or lällätilää (Malagasy Wiktionary doesn't count). And oftentimes a synonym is plenty good enough - alloploidy is a synonym for allopolyploidy, who the hell really wants more than that? Anyway, hopefully this will spur you on, Mr. During, to keep on beefing up en.wikt. And well done to all of us, even those who add thousands of tiny placenames nobody cares about. Father of minus 2 (talk) 00:41, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Bonus: every time any of us makes an incremental improvement to Wiktionary, somewhere in the world a hater's eye cries a beautiful tear. Quercus solaris (talk) 05:57, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

I don't tend to work much on obscure words (not clever enough for that!), but mostly on common words, just a tiny fraction of those 600,000, but I will say that, in my experience, many common-word entries that haven't had a recent makeover by one of our expert editors or cunning linguists are somewhat poor or incomplete. Mihia (talk) 20:56, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

living daylights

living daylights currently redirects to knock the living daylights out of, despite the existence of scare the living daylights out of (which is what I was looking up). However both senses have multiple synonyms with different verbs e.g. in less than five minutes searching I've found examples of "beat", "punch", "thump", "blast", and even "after having the living daylights shaken, rocked or squeezed out of them"[4] for the "knock" senses and "frighten" for the "scare" sense. Redirecting "living daylights" to just one of the two is clearly wrong (and neither seems obviously more common than the other), but I'm not sure how to structure it instead. The multiple "knock" senses are clearly not interchangeable with the "scare" senses argues for two separate entries, but the large number of synonyms for both argue that the set phrases do not include the verb - the only element that distinguishes them. Complicating matters further is that some verbs can be used with either, depending on the sense of the verb being used, e.g. "shake" ("move rapidly" → "knock"; "emotionally shock" → "scare"), "shock" ("emotionally shock" → "scare", "electric shock" → "knock"), which I guess might argue for a single entry with a usage note? Thryduulf (talk) 17:52, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

We ought to identify the minimum idiomatic element, which surely is "living daylights". There ought to be identifiable definition(s) of "living daylights" (non-gloss if absolutely necessary), which can go at living daylights, with the longer phrases that you mention given there as examples. Mihia (talk) 22:05, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

We could use {{collocation}} to insert at least one of each of the various near-synonyms, eg, scare, beat, preferably including each of the most common verbs (which on NGrams are scare, beat, fuck, frighten, and knock. Scare in its four forms is, by far the most common, constituting 40+% of the total usage, but it is not hard to find many others (eg, shake, curse, tax(!)). DCDuring (talk) 23:12, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

I've just discovered we have "the shit out of", which includes "the daylights out of", "the living daylights out of" and "the hell out of" as three of many synonyms. The latter of those (and the only blue link) doesn't list any synonyms but includes "scare the X out of" as a related term. Thryduulf (talk) 14:04, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

If we handled failed searches better, with a more user-friendly appearance and better selectivity, we wouldn't need full entries for every variation of terms like this or even long lists of collocations, as the search would lead users to entries that were sufficiently similar to the search term to address a high percentage of underlying needs. DCDuring (talk) 15:22, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Totally agree. Mihia (talk) 15:28, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

There's also bejesus, which uses a different approach. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:29, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

BTW, one can find "scare the living daylights into [PERSON]". DCDuring (talk) 17:14, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

I see only a very few hits for "scare the living daylights into". Just a few people muddling up the expression? Mihia (talk) 21:36, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Ha ha, yeah, it would seem that they crammed together the thought patterns of put the fear of God into and scare the living daylights out of. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:15, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

LDL's, mentions, etc.

Recently I added borowica, however one issue is that {{R:zlw-opl:SSP1953}} mentions two uses but provides no examples. {{R:zlw-opl:SPJSP}} mentions this and also chooses to mostly skip these terms (the definitions are listed, but not categorized, which is the main point of that dictionary). I am wondering if we should skip these two extra definitions as well. I was unable to find any examples elsewhere. This source is generally very reliable, but I'm not sure this is the kind of mention that should count (as opposed to contemporary mention). Vininn126 (talk) 21:32, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

ਸਿੱਖ: no trailing a?

On ਸਿੱਖ, why does our dictionary entry for punjabi list the word as sikkha when our one cited source and our audio just have it as sikkh with no trailing a? I've also cross-referenced the words on the page with the transliteration guide and I don't see a reason a would be added. I would correct this, as it seems like an error, but I know nothing about this language so maybe that is the way it should be for some reason. Dingolover6969 (talk) 00:30, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

tide

• The periodic change of the level of the sea, particularly when caused by the gravitational influence of the moon and the sun.

Why "particularly"? Is there any other type of periodic change in the level of the sea that we call a "tide", other than that caused by the gravitational influence of the moon and the sun? Mihia (talk) 21:33, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

A very powerful magnet, perhaps? Father of minus 2 (talk) 21:39, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

I'd say you're right, Mihia — "particularly when" is best deleted there. Also, I think the moon is what counts — the sun's gravity pulls on the earth, but it isn't what causes the tides specifically; so "and the sun" is best deleted, too. In fairness to whoever wrote "particularly when", they may have been thinking of things like (1) wind can influence tides (make them higher or lower) and (2) a tsunami is sometimes misnomered as a tidal wave because of the sea level changes involved (i.e., low then high).^{w:tidal wave • w:storm surge • tide § Misnomers} —Quercus solaris (talk) 05:40, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

The sun does have an influence on the tides, though not as much as the moon. This is why we have spring tides (sun reinforcing moon) and neap tides (sun opposing moon). Mihia (talk) 10:01, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Aha! Thanks for that. Quercus solaris (talk) 15:18, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

The tides are also affected by the shape of the shoreline.--Urszag (talk) 20:07, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

It's true that other factors have an effect, such as the shape of the coast, the undersea topography, wind, and air pressure, but I would say that these affect the tides rather than actually causing them. We could say something like "The daily fluctuation in the level of the sea caused by the gravitational influence of the moon and the sun, and additionally affected by the shape of the coast, the undersea topography, wind, and air pressure" but I don't feel that it's really necessary. It seems more for an encyclopedia article. Mihia (talk) 20:47, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

We could divide our definitions by those who would use them.

Our first definition could be a relatively naive definition, perhaps not even referring to gravity, but retaining the 'causal' role of the moon. I would expect this definition to work well as the translation target for a very large share of our species' languages, at least those spoken by people close to bodies of salt water.

A geophysicist and students of basic geophysics would have a definition with the causal effect of gravity, and possibly include the atmosphere, magma (and crust?) among the influenced.

An astrophysicist would include more gravitational bodies and more possible 'fluids'. DCDuring (talk) 20:56, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

I've just recently added a secondary definition to cover "Any similar gravitational effect on Earth or other body" with examples of land tides and tides on Europa. Mihia (talk) 21:00, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Are we sure Catalan -enc is from PGer *-ingaz but Occitan -enc used the same way is from Lat. -ēnsis?

-enc Something about this feels wrong (the languages are very closely related, although stranger false cognates have happened), but I can't put a finger on it, and I don't know where to even find an Occitan etymological dictionary. Ellenor2000 (talk) 18:06, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Your suspicions are correct. Both entries originally had the same incorrect etymology (‘Latin -ensis’), then someone came along to correct the Catalan entry but left the Occitan entry untouched. It’s fixed now.

Incidentally, a rather exhaustive overview of the Romance suffixes of this type is available here.

Nicodene (talk) 18:59, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Mister

1. An informal title used before a nickname or other moniker.

   Mister Suave

   Mister Baseball

I don't really get this. Is used before a nickname actually correct? I mean, if you call someone "Mister Baseball", isn't "Mister Baseball" his nickname, not "Baseball"? Is the definition just wrong, or am I missing something here? Mihia (talk) 20:50, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

You're right that it could stand to have improved wording. Something about an informal title used to create a nickname etc. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:11, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

I boldly edited it. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:54, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, it makes more sense now. Mihia (talk) 18:53, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Layla, Leila, Laila, Lyla

help Zbutie3.14 (talk) 05:58, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Done. The sound of the stressed vowel varies among people so named. One of the reasons for that fact is that given names live varied lives across time, space, and the people so called. Quercus solaris (talk) 15:33, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

thanks Zbutie3.14 (talk) 16:52, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Turkish usage notes on pronouns

Some personal pronouns, like biz, benim and sen, have some inconsistent usage notes. The first one is said to be “one of the two words that (...)”, but then, in the second one, two other words of the same kind are listed, making it three words (If I understood correctly). Since I don't speak Turkish, I don't know which correct version it should be. OweOwnAwe (talk) 15:10, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, ben, biz and su all have irregularities that manifest in the genitive singular. That of the first two, a suffix -(n)i⁴m instead of the regular -(n)i⁴n is the same and is specific for the genitive case singular; that of the last one, -(y)i⁴- instead of the regular -(n)i⁴- is different and not specific for the genitive but also seen for the definive accusative and dative singular.  ​‑‑Lambiam 23:03, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Mister, mister

Our main (or fullest) entry is at Mister, while the exact purpose of mister is not so clear to me. My philosophy is that where "Mister" comes before a person's name, or could be replaced by a person's name, it should properly be capitalised. This takes care of all but possibly one of the examples presently at mister. I am tempted to put these under the definition "alternative to Mister" with some kind of caution/labelling. I don't know whether "proscribed" may be too strong though. The remaining example at mister is "There's only three misters aboard this ship, or, rather, there's only two." I can't access enough of the surrounding context to really get an idea of whether "two misters" means e.g. "Mister Smith" and "Mister Jones", and should probably be "Misters", or whether it is actually a genuine use of the lower-case form. What do you think? Does the lower-case form separately exist, or is it always a (possibly questionable) alternative to the upper-case? Some dictionaries particularly list lower-case as the informal address as in "Excuse me, mister", which I would, again, properly capitalise, as it substitutes for a proper name. Any views? Mihia (talk) 21:53, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

There's something missing, so far, at mister#Noun. The vocative sense is covered there, but the other common noun sense is not yet covered, and it ought to be; it is the sense that the derived terms come from (i.e., misters before sisters, sisters before misters, sister from another mister). Quercus solaris (talk) 23:04, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Update: I fixed that concern. Regarding the sense with title-ness and vocativeness, I agree, Mihia, that the capitalized spelling is the best spelling, although it can't be said to be the sole "correct" spelling because of the complexities of what's descriptively true about the variable orthography used for proper nouns. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:11, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

PS: Bonus points: Now I've gone and got Mr. Mister in my head. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:16, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for adding the new sense, "a man". I originally thought the "only three misters" example might simply mean "three men", but subsequently I have found enough context to see that this is rank-based, i.e. only three men with sufficient rank to be called "Mister", so really it's a title, and could be "Misters", I would say, so it may go under the "alternative spelling of 'Mister'" sense, I believe. Mihia (talk) 15:24, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

March 2025

Royd

The English sense of royd (Yorkshire dialect for a clearing) recently failed RFV and I can see why but it would be a shame to not note this meaning somewhere. There are place names such as Royd and Wood Royd in Sheffield and Hebden Royd and Mytholmroyd (virtually coterminous with and hence synonymous with it) in Calderdale, Gilroyd in Barnsley and Prince Royd in Huddersfield. There are also personal names like Ackroyd and Murgatroyd and various roads and houses called ‘the Royd’ (including a care home as far away from Yorkshire as Handsworth Wood, Birmingham!), ‘the royds’ and ‘Royd house’, so we should really have an entry for Royd or -royd instead. Any thoughts on that? Overlordnat1 (talk) 08:24, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

• I thought the same. We could accept those places as quotations to keep royd. Or perhaps we didn't search enough for quotes for royd. I'm undoing the RFV for now while the discussion remains. Pious Eterino (talk) 20:42, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

If it passes RFV, fine. But if there's no evidence that the word on its own survived into modern English, I don't see why the rules should be bent. — Sgconlaw (talk) 20:46, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

There are some quotes on Google Books that I can't access Pious Eterino (talk) 20:51, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

And this is promising, though it is difficult to tell when it was written. Pious Eterino (talk) 20:53, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Even if it didn't survive in itself, can't we say "now only in place names and personal names"? Mihia (talk) 21:02, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes. Cf. قَشْلَة (qašla), كَفْر (kafr); in the first one I expressed it in the etymology as I already had to touch upon chronology, rather than a usage note as in the second. Both make a {{label}} redundant and optional. Fay Freak (talk) 21:42, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

unfortunately

What is the difference between our two senses? Our quotes don't make this clear imo. PUC – 18:11, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

The distinction that can be made is more syntactic than semantic. The second definition, seems to be for use as a sentence adverb, the first as a traditional adverb. Unfortunately[sentence adverb], the usage example was unfortunately[normal adverb] misplaced under the first definition. The first definition is likely in decline for many Englishes, but certainly in the US, in my experience. DCDuring (talk) 19:33, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

Agreed on all points. Nicodene (talk) 05:10, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Buoyed by agreement, I've moved the existing usex and added two that fit the first adverb definition, one modifying a verb, the other an adjective. DCDuring (talk) 17:06, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

click off

• To click outside or next to an element, for instance a window in a graphical user interface.

Is this actually an idiomatic or phrasal-verb sense of "click off", or is it just "click" + "off" in the sense of "away from"? Mihia (talk) 21:58, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree with your impulse to question this. To my eye, the entryworthiness of click off is quite dubious, as follows: I hold that the sense "to click outside or next to an element" is SoP, and I hold that its antonym, to click on (an element), is likewise SoP. One can compare step off, which has idiomatic and &lit senses, and one might at first think that click off could exist for the same reasons, but personally I find it dubious to argue that check off and tick off (on a checkbox or tick box) have an idiomatically established synonym in click off. They don't; the fact that a listener would understand the meaning in context is not the same as saying that the collocation has idiomatic establishment. The same theme goes for the other alleged nonliteral/non-SoP senses at click off — there is some aspect of forcing "quasi-translation" here — the person who created the entry unduly conflated the concepts of [1] idiomatically established synonyms versus [2] extempore improvisations in speech that a listener can comprehend contextually but that fall short of that status. But such a notion is untenable because if it were entertained then the population of alleged phrasal verbs would be gargantuan and limitless, unbounded. For example, I could joke to my interlocutor that I am going to spatula up a cake batter instead of whip up a cake batter, but that doesn't mean that spatula up is an established synonym of whip up. Having rejected those alleged senses, we are then left with solely the &lit sense, and Wiktionary doesn't enter collocations that have only &lit senses. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:32, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

I sent it to RFD. Mihia (talk) 18:43, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Possible misspellings in definitions

If you're interested in fixing misspellings or adding missing words that are used in definitions, I've just updated the listing of possible problems at Wiktionary:Spell check/likely misspellings. -- Beland (talk) 01:05, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

@User:Beland Useful. How often do you intend to update it? DCDuring (talk) 17:34, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

New dumps become available on the 1st and 20th of every month, so twice a month is the most often it could feasibly be updated. That might be too often if it stomps on work-in-progress and the actual dictionary entries change slowly. By "stomp" I mean that the easiest way to update the list is to simply delete everything there and post the new results. That erases any notes added to list entries, and also doesn't take into account edits made between midnight on dump day and when the results are posted (which is maybe 2-10 days depending on the dump; the 20th-of-the-month dumps don't include page history so are available for download a lot faster). I can prevent stomping from affecting workflow by moving any notes to a separate section and updating the list after looking at the recent page history, but that's a bit more manual overhead.

This is less of a problem if we don't have a backlog of unresolved manual notes hanging around. For example, it looks like you've found a bunch of entries that are legitimate alternate forms. Creating a Wiktionary entry that uses Template:alternative spelling of, Template:alternative form of, etc. will prevent these items from showing up on the list in the future, without the need to add a note to the list. I added some suggestions to the top of the page along these lines, but I'm open to whatever workflow editors find most productive.

At the other extreme, it's been over a year since the last update, and that seems like too long. I'm happy to do an update any time editors feel the list has gotten stale; I'm much more active on Wikipedia than here, so I might not notice that on my own. But if someone pings me I'll get that notice pretty quick. I update some reports for Wikipedia copy editors once a month because it's easier to avoid stomping due to the faster turnaround of the 20th-of-the-month dumps. I could do that here as well if editors are actively using the report, or I'm open to suggestions. -- Beland (talk) 19:41, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

One of the biggest wastes of time for users of this or any other periodically updated list of problem entries is to go to the entry with the identified potential problem only to find some else has handled it. I wonder whether we could come up with technical improvements to address this. Spitballing some approaches:

1. a checkbox updatable from the displayed list that indicated outcomes of improvement efforts, eg, problem solved, no problem existed, uncertain (=possibly a "hard problem"). A numerical- or letter-grade might be a nice of implementing or even indicating degree of confidence.
2. sublists that are specialized by language (L2) and/or other heading L3 or more under which the error appears. It is easier to completely dispose of a short, specialized list that an long and/or heterogeneous list or mark which items on such a list have been more or less resolved.
3. for this particular list we could allow a user to trigger, from the displayed list, a search for the offending term. If not found, the problems must have been resolved.

I note that, in contrast, lists of completely missing entries do not have this problem because of the coloring of links (red/blue/orange). This may contribute to the enthusiasm and haste with which missing entries are added. With new entry lists, the problem is with items that many users think are not worth entering because likely unattestable or hard to attest or likely to be RfDed.

As Wiktionary has achieved a high level of coverage of terms, it is probably time to focus on tools that can aid contributors in resolving possible entry quality problems that require human judgment. DCDuring (talk) 21:02, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Where is it?

Where is the “LGBT slang” sense of work referred to in the “Alternative forms” section? OweOwnAwe (talk) 03:36, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

@OweOwnAwe: We have it as a form, not a separate sense. J3133 (talk) 08:50, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

• I've had a go at adding it. Finding senses where it's actually spelled "work" is hard, just because of how often the word is used in other contexts. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:58, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

  Thanks! OweOwnAwe (talk) 17:19, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

testificate

A couple of years ago someone reverted an edit on the page testificate by someone who was attempting to add a sense of the word that had originated from minecraft. I don't doubt that at the time it might not have met the criteria for inclusion, as it was only a couple of years after the game had come out, however the use of said word has persisted. I managed to find all three of these sources within less than half an hour, and while I recognize they aren't great sources - and that one of them is heavily *referencing* the game - they all are outside of reference to the world of minecraft. For a suggestion of a definition, it would probably be something similar to the internet slang defintion of NPC, perhaps slightly less derogatory. if anyone wants better sources, I can probably find some - again, these were found rather quickly. All this to say that if one looks at my edit history one can see that I have made a number of constructive edits, I genuinely think this might be a word someone could come across and want to know what it means - and as such, I feel like that sense of the word should be included. https://x.com/fnftestguy/status/1764407355628806604 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS3U4UnRXJM https://www.worldanvil.com/block/490968 Again, please know that this me attempting to contribute constructively, and that if consensus thinks I'm full of nonsense, I will obviously not push the issue. Froglegseternal (talk) 07:51, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Okay. On my quest for more reliable sources I'm realizing that pretty much everything either references minecraft or is derivative of minecraft (i.e., minecraft fan content present in another game). I could've sworn I've heard the phrase used in a non-minecraft context, but I might just be so firmly entrenched in the community that I made this up. Retracting this, unless someone else has something they want to say. Froglegseternal (talk) 08:45, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

I commend your impulse to give it lexicographic coverage. And I also commend your judgment in reaching the conclusion that it probably needs more time, seeping further into the wider world, before it meets Wiktionary:CFI. In the meantime, at least, when people who need to look it up are searching the web for it, they can get an answer without too much trouble, because of it being covered by Urban Dictionary and by various glossaries of Minecraft on the web. If its non-Minecraft-adjacent use grows, then Wiktionary will be ready for it. Quercus solaris (talk) 16:13, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

And this discussion should be archived on Talk:testificate. DCDuring (talk) 17:36, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

I backlinked from there to here, so far. After a bit I will look up how to do the subst-type thing and do it in this case. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:29, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Is this discussion done? It is a great explicitification of the decision process. Maybe it should be on display here for a while. DCDuring (talk) 01:15, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't think we've archived anything recently. CitationsFreak (talk) 17:34, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Attributive/adjectival horror

There's a bit of tabloidese where "horror" is used either attributively or adjectivally to describe something that causes a brutal injury or death - often a foul in sports or a car crash. For example, "Crystal Palace striker Jean-Philippe Mateta has said he will come back “stronger than ever” after being hospitalised in a horror clash with Millwall’s goalkeeper at Selhurst Park on Saturday". Is this a distinct sense, do we think, or is it just an unconventional attributive use of sense 2 "Something horrible; that which excites horror"? Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:31, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

MWOnline has an adj. def.: "calculated to inspire feelings of dread or horror". I don't think 'calculated' is broad enough, but they think that it's worth an extra PoS. DCDuring (talk) 01:34, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Their adj might well refer to "horror novel", "horror movie" etc., not to tabloidese. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:857D:9973:3D20:ED11 01:40, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Unless you can say, “It was a very horror film, but not as horror as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”, the MWOnline sense does not pass the most common test for being an adjective, nor in fact any of the other tests.  ​‑‑Lambiam 20:01, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

IMO it is the attributive use of the noun sense “something horrible”, being replaceable by horrible. Things that have been called a horror experience include having one’s iPhone stolen,^[5] getting bad service with bad food,^[6] or staying in a hostel with a snoring roommate.^[7]  ​‑‑Lambiam 20:26, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

(be) up someone's ass

• 2014 August 28, Christine Regan Lake, Sophia’s Lovers, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 67:

  "I've always had an issue with authority so working for someone who was up my ass and micromanaging me wasn't exactly an ideal scenario for me. Let's just say, it provided a very fertile place for my anger to thrive."

We also have get up someone's ass. Should that entry and the cite above be moved to up someone's ass or does it make more sense to just add be up someone's ass? (Do get up someone's ass and be up someone's ass have distinct senses? How many other verbs can "up someone's ass" be used with / can it be used without verbs?) - -sche (discuss) 23:29, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

You can crawl up someone's ass, in which case you are all up in their ass, which is to say, all up in their business. Why are you up my ass? I don't like it when you're up my ass. I think the lemma should be up someone's ass, and the crawling and the getting and the being are copulatively corollary to it. One can be up one's ass, too, that is, up one's own ass, which is anything from self-involved to self-absorbed to full of oneself. He's so far up his own ass, he can't even breathe. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:23, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Core lemma prep. phrase with hard redirects from and/or usage examples of the main collocations. DCDuring (talk) 01:31, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

beastly

As has already been noted by another user on the talk page, we currently say that this word is basically restricted to the United Kingdom. I'm personally not aware that it is typical of the UK at all; but even if so, I doubt that it should be tagged "UK" without any weasel word such as "especially" or "chiefly". 2.202.159.64 04:53, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

My guess is that whoever tagged it was thinking of the dated "very unpleasant" sense, which I think is very British (almost stereotypically so), but tagged every sense for some reason. For what it's worth though, Google ngrams shows "beastly" in all its senses falling into obscurity in American English in the 20th century - by 1980, it scrapes 0.00001% usage - while remaining consistently strong in British English - even at its lowest point, it's used 4 times as often, and that's not taking into account the weaknesses of ngrams in terms of properly isolating British and American writing. I think an "especially" might be warranted. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:45, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Excellent points. Thematically related: Just yesterday I happened to skim the portion of Wikipedia where it claims that notional agreement for grammatical number is (quote-unquote) "exclusively" British, but any American with a nonwooden ear will know that the correct idea there should be on the lines of "especially" or "usually". I didn't bother to fix it yesterday because I have to choose my battles among possibilities for edit wars with Randy in Boise. Randy may have specified "exclusively" so that his boss or friend or whoever would be told by Wikipedia that Randy was right. Quercus solaris (talk) 15:40, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

PS: I snarkily kid, but this does touch on an underlying pedagogical fact. I feel certain that many readers assume (no matter how childish it is to assume it) that a geolect label saying nothing but the region (i.e., without any qualifier) denotes literal exclusiveness to that region, meaning that other varieties are "not allowed" (by whom, by the Man Upstairs presumably?) to use the form and that they "never" use it except as a "mistake". That's the other likelihood for where Randy got his misapprehension (leading to his "exclusively"). One way to handle this problem would be to always specify "especially" or "chiefly" whenever it applies. I advocate that approach, although I predict that probably someone will complain that it isn't terse enough and that there are too many "especiallies" written down and it hurts their eyes to see them all, regardless of their being both accurate and pedagogically necessary. Quercus solaris (talk) 15:56, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Declining the undeclinable

The Greek pronoun όλα is classified in the headword line as undeclinable, but next thing we see a declension table. What gives?  ​‑‑Lambiam 19:06, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

r colored vowel in north and other words?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel#Examples Zbutie3.14 (talk) 18:26, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

want nachos and reheat nachos

Please move to want someone's nachos and reheat someone's nachos, the forms shown in all citations. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:E10B:695A:5C92:3759 19:05, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

 Done This, that and the other (talk) 10:50, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

"bronchiae"

We have an entry bronchiae. I don't think that word exists! Eric Kvaalen (talk) 19:41, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

 Done. You're right. I fixed it. It is {{misconstruction of}} bronchia, not {{synonym of}} it. Done. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:05, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

PS: masc-fem-neut Latin declensions — English speakers sometimes mix them up for naturalized words (e.g., -us/-i, -a/-ae, -um/-a). That's where they get *"diverticuli", for example. IMO Wiktionary should mark them, most accurately, as misconstructions, although "misspelling" is close enough until it gets optimized. Reason: the writer didn't misspell the appropriate syllable but rather used the wrong syllable. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:11, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! Eric Kvaalen (talk) 09:21, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

‌ We sometimes call these hypercorrect. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:12, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

True that *octopi, for example, is a hypercorrection. But at least the misapprehension in that case is based on a plausible notion: they see the terminal syllable -us and they assume that -i for Latin first-declension plural applies, which it often would for many words in -us. In contrast, pairs such as *diverticulus/*diverticuli are differentiable as (members of the class of) just plain misremembering or misassuming which declension applies. More of a misconstruction than anything else. Thus, I think for dumbdownmaxx⁠ing purposes it's best for the entry to say "misconstruction of X" without any label mentioning hypercorrection, because some readers would just assume without checking that "hypercorrection" always means "especially correct" or "technically the most correct option although insisting on it is too persnickety." That's what "hypercorrection" means when someone insists that formulas "ought to be" changed to formulae or that carcinomas "ought to be" changed to carcinomata (but no, that's a misapprehension, because STEM English idiomatically uses the regularized plural more often, having naturalized the word all the way from an unadapted borrowing into an adapted borrowing; a good major dictionary such as MWU or AHD shows this by listing the regularized plural first and the Latinate one second, which I noted here in case anyone asks "who says"). Rather than leave any nuance to the reader's perceptiveness (which is near zero, from the dumbdownmaxxing perspective), best to just convey "mistake". Quercus solaris (talk) 22:52, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

on the batter

Which sense of batter does this derive from? Jin and Tonik (talk) 12:04, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

One we don't currently have, apparently: batter meaning "to have sex" (presumably by the same logic as bonk, bang, pound etc). Smurrayinchester (talk) 12:32, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

(Re-reading, it might also come from barter). Smurrayinchester (talk) 12:35, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Green's has batter (“semen, etc.”). DCDuring (talk) 16:06, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

And why does it appear in "derived terms" at beautiful?? 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:BD8F:976:A4DC:6C26 16:40, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

A possible meaning of woke

According to Infopédia, a Portuguese dictionary, woke may mean "promoting political correctness and cancel culture by advocating for unreasonable or extremist proposals based on positions of moral superiority". Is the term sometimes used with this meaning in English too, or is it Portuguese-only? Davi6596 (talk) 03:19, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I would say that it would be a more specific form of how people currently use the word. The main meaning would be "in support of left-leaning causes". Typically derogatory, in my experience. CitationsFreak (talk) 08:56, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Quite true, although the word is also now undergoing a semantic broadening, as it is coming to refer to any butthurt urge to impose cancellation on others, whether from the left or from the right. Thus a new set of hyponymous terms has arisen as "the woke left" and "the woke right". The best exposition on this phenomenon that I have yet bothered to read is the one that John McWhorter published a few weeks ago. —Quercus solaris (talk) 23:21, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I asked that because wokismo's sense 1 is literally wokeism, but sense 2 is what I quoted (but translated differently). And I think both senses are covered by wokeism nowadays, since its derogatory meaning seems translingual AFAIK. Davi6596 (talk) 00:07, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

woke right might merit its own definition because it seems paradoxical Purplebackpack89 14:31, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

My edit of woke's sense 4 is an attempt to describe that broadening and thus cover woke right. But, because this term isn't intuitive, as Purplebackpack said, it isn't SoP and is entry-worthy. Davi6596 (talk) 12:09, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

The meaning is dependent on who uses the term. The far right uses the term as a derogatory label for anything the speaker does not like (such as a desire to treat all people in an equal and decent way, regardless of gender, colour or ethnicity). Thus, in the war against "woke", a desk plaque saying "Be kind to everyone" may be removed as being unacceptable.^[8] At the left side of the spectrum, the term is used in an approbative sense for being aware, not only that the equal and decent treatment of all people, regardless of gender, colour or ethnicity, leaves something to be desired, but also that there is a systematic aspect to this.  ​‑‑Lambiam 13:45, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Can sense 2 of wokismo be incorporated into woke and wokeism in some way, or is it better to simply define wokismo as wokeism? Davi6596 (talk) 14:56, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Treatment of people as equal is opposite to being aware - context responsive. You do not treat people equally even with respect to your own emotional eventuality (state). I think equality is enforcing simplicity in place of pragmatic awareness 85.237.234.194 05:09, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Heh. There is a frequent claim that the 'right' (etc.) "don't know what woke means" or "use woke to refer to anything about gender or race", but this claim is an invention that nobody is given an opportunity to deny. I suspect it is pretty well recognised really that "woke" is the militant, scolding (wokescold), perma-offended attitude that won't tolerate any opposing opinion. Nobody is complaining about seeing women or black people succeeding, but rather about forced tokenism. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:B12B:824A:E20E:ED73 05:12, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

BTW, I think wokeness should be defined simply as "the quality or state of being woke". The meaning of woke depends on context, and its possible senses are already listed in its entry. Davi6596 (talk) 13:21, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree with that; in general, just as a pragmatic measure, whenever there've been multiple discussions about how to define a word, and the definition keeps getting changed and/or is rather long, it's beneficial to centralize it to one entry rather than having (e.g.) "X-ly" and "X-ness" and "X" either redundantly present the same long definitions of X or (often) present subtly different ideas of X that fall out of sync with each other. (If I could think of a sensible way to define either atheist or atheism in terms of the other word, I think it'd be beneficial to centralize that pair's shades of meaning to one entry, too...) - -sche (discuss) 17:31, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

on => Serbocroatian

Hi

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on#Serbo-Croatian

In the inflection table from on I cant find the forms njihov or njegov. Is this OK?

Greetings Rasmusklump (talk) 11:26, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

bornt

We label this as Geordie, but I think it also exists in some other (American? African-American?) dialects. I can find it in the speech of one of the characters in Woody Guthrie's 1983 Bound for Glory ("oughtta been bornt sooner"), and in the speech of a Black character in American author Rivers Solomon's 2017 sci-fi An Unkindness of Ghosts (which has both "been bornt" and "Maybe we all should’ve bornt ourselves in another time, another place"). I'm not sure what dialects, exactly, it belongs to (and thus how best to expand the label, beyond the copout of "Geordie and some other dialects"). - -sche (discuss) 01:39, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

subsuntive

This word turns up in some of our Guaraní inflection tables (see e.g. kuaa) but we don't have an entry for it. Google results suggest it is NNSE. But what does it mean? This, that and the other (talk) 10:53, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

An unusual spelling of subsumptive; Guarani has a so-called subsumptive voice,^[9] in Spanish voz subsuntiva.^[10]  ​‑‑Lambiam 13:14, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@Lambiam thanks. It seems we are missing an entry for the Spanish subsuntivo as well! This, that and the other (talk) 02:20, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

I have added a linguistic sense to the entry for subsumptive. I have not found Spanish subsuntivo in any sense in dictionaries and uses only in the linguistic sense, by two linguists in publications on the grammar of Guarani, so I doubt this warrants an entry here.  ​‑‑Lambiam 11:13, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

appingo

Latin appingo, appingere. To paint, to write. John C. Traupman, Latin & English Dictionary, Bantam, 1988, p. 18. 72.33.2.44 16:26, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Also, appingo (ad-pango): to fasten. Our main sources (Gaffiot/L&S) mention it, you can create the page if you want/can, otherwise I'll do it myself. Saumache (talk) 14:01, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

내한 vs. 래조

내한 is only used by South Koreans, as North Koreans call their country 조선. Implying that the North Korean standard is 래한 (as the entry does) is inaccurate, and mentioning 래조 within the 내한 entry both complicates navigation for those looking for North Korea-specific terms, and places the North Korean variety in a position of subordination to the South Korean one.

I propose creating a new entry, 래조, to reflect the North Korean standard. Of course, this would be tagged as {{lb|ko|North Korea}}. Tobiascide (talk) 01:17, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Tobiascide, Who uses 래한? Anyone? Is the entry simply mistaken to say 래한 is the North Korean standard, and is (part of) the solution to simply change the entry's mention of 래한 to 래조?
(I have noted Wiktionary's failure to acknowledge North Korean on occasion myself, e.g. entries for North-Korean-only terms that give only South Korean and not North Korean pronunciations...) - -sche (discuss) 18:39, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

fruity

Reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien I came across the adjective fruity to describe a laughter or a voice. I don't think any of the current definitions of fruity in Wiktionary describe the intended meaning. I'm not a native speaker though 91.126.42.74 05:37, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, this is not uncommon, though perhaps a bit dated. It means something like "deep and rich" (like a fruit, I guess). — Sgconlaw (talk) 11:45, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Merriam–Webster has: “of a voice : rich and deep”, giving a sentence by Tolkien as usage example: “They … have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it).”^[11] The work is not stated, but it sounds to me like part of a description of hobbits.  ​‑‑Lambiam 16:55, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

See plummy. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:2452:AA6A:7CD1:369A 11:46, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Is dozen a determiner?

We only have it as a noun, but the Collins Concise English Dictionary also has it as a determiner. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary of American English, on the other hand, has it as a noun and an adjective. J3133 (talk) 08:51, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

I would like to know the answer too. I am still a bit fuzzy on the concept of a determiner, though it seems from some of our number entries that numbers can act as determiners in some cases. For example, one hundred and one and 101, in the sense "a great many; numerous" ("perhaps the readers may need 101 ways to cook two-minute noodles"), is marked as a determiner. (101 was featured as a WOTD in February.) — Sgconlaw (talk) 11:43, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

CGEL (2005) distinguishes between determiner (a word class) and determinatives (a syntactic function) (AFAICR). All cardinal numbers can be used as determinatives. There are complications that led CGEL (1985) to the creation of predeterminer. See w:English determiner. DCDuring (talk) 12:48, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

• Many languages require a determiner before a noun. In those languages, numbers (one, two...) and "some" are considered determiners and may be used in place of "the" or "an" (related: many languages also use the same word for "an" and "one"). If numbers and "some" are considered determiners, then "dozen" should be too. Purplebackpack89 15:18, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

"Dozen" doesn't behave like "five" or "the". You can say "I bought five eggs" or "I bought the eggs" but (in my dialect, at least) you can't say "I bought *dozen eggs": I need to put a determiner before it (e.g. "I bought a dozen eggs/five dozen eggs"). The cardinal numeral "hundred" behaves the same way. If CGEL says that all cardinal numbers can be determinatives, perhaps the same arguments apply to "dozen" as to "hundred": I haven't read its analysis yet so I don't know what evidence there is for calling either a determinative.--Urszag (talk) 15:25, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

The problem I have with "dozen" as a determiner is that I can't think of a way to use it without a determiner or a number in front of it in the singular, and it seems to be always followed by "of" in the plural when modifying anything. This seems to parallel larger numbers like hundred, thousand and million, as well as score. It's different from words for standard sets of things such as set, batch and team, which seem to act like units of measure such as foot,quart and acre. With pair, you find older usage like "I bought 4 pair", but mostly it's more like "3 pairs of shoes".

The whole phrase containing "dozen" seems to function like a determiner, as in "I bought a dozen cupcakes" / "I bought a cupcake" / "I bought 3 cupcakes"- but "dozen" itself doesn't. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:06, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Many quantifiers that can function as determiners when used alone also find use with core determiners preceding them ('the/these/those/some/any few/dozen/four eggs'). But that dozen, couple, pair, trio, octet, and hundred among others (almost?) always need a preceding determiner in all but perhaps a few lects of English suggest that they should not have a determiner PoS. DCDuring (talk) 17:27, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

I consulted CGEL. It refers to "dozens" as a (quantificational) noun on pages 349, 351, but says on page 351 that these plural nouns should be distinguished from the singular in constructions such as "a dozen spiders" and "three hundred voters", which it says are determiner + head noun constructions. Rastall 2019 argues that not only "dozen", but also various other words such as "many", "most" and "second" should be categorized as numerals and not as adjectives.--Urszag (talk) 17:32, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

A belated comment for this thread. My gut is convinced that a lot of and a couple of and a few dozen and dozens of function unitarily as determiners of an open compound nature. But I can't prove it and am many years away from consuming and grokking CGEL, at my current rate. I just scribbled this note as something that I hope to follow up on someday, years from now. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:11, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Swedish entries with masculine/feminine gender

Today 108.30.78.192 (as of now, this is the only contribution) changed Swedish man from masculine to common gender, with the edit summary:

Switched from noun type masculine gender to common gender, because masculine is not a grammatical gender in modern Swedish. The only grammatical genders in Swedish are common and neuter, and 'man' is of common gender, as evidenced by its singular definite form 'mannen'. https://svenska.se/saol/?id=1840128&pz=5

However, there are some entries for nouns used in modern Swedish with masculine/feminine gender (in Category:Swedish masculine nouns and Category:Swedish feminine nouns), e.g., ande, näder, premetro, rackare, and notably pojke (“boy”). Are these supposed to be changed or was this edit incorrect? I did not find guidelines for gender in Wiktionary:Swedish entry guidelines. J3133 (talk) 07:54, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

The template {{sv-noun}} accepts the genders c, f, m and n. This commingles the natural genders with the grammatical genders (see Gender in Danish and Swedish), which seems murky to me. What if the grammatical gender is neuter but the natural gender is masculine, as in “Han, Guds lamm, har offrat sig”^[12]? The Swedish Wikitionary does not mention genders but only gives the definite forms that determine the grammatical gender, and the template {{da-noun}} accepts only c and n. IMO {{sv-noun}} should do likewise.  ​‑‑Lambiam 08:50, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

OED first attestation policy

I am trying to add as much "First attested in the" as I can in my edits to English entries. I am more and more encountering situations where the OED first attestation dates are not congruent with other sources I use (mainly the Middle English Compendium). I just read their preface, finding nothing explaining this issue I was wondering if any of you were aware of some policies the OED uses in ascribing first attestation to a said word, such as not going as far as Middle English for Romance-Latin borrowings (the case in which I am met with the most incongruencies) but going back to Old English for inherited terms; or, the feature is not all that reliable and not to be gullibly trusted. In my view, first attestation would be the first time a given term has been seen in use in any historical form of a given language, orthography bearing no relevance. Saumache (talk) 17:22, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

The first thing to be aware of is that the OED has always treated Old English, Middle English and Scots as part of English, but we don't. The same is true of the MW dictionary that we imported entries from eons ago, which is why you see a constant stream of rfvs asking if a term made it past Middle English. I don't deal much with "first attested" dates, but I don't think we treat the date of first attestation in Middle English as the date of first attestation in an English entry. Not that such information is banned from English etymologies, but it would need to be qualified properly. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:36, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I see, but if I follow your "I don't think we treat the date of first attestation in Middle English as the date of first attestation in an English entry", it would mean that every English term derived from ME has its first attestation at the quite arbitrary date of 1500 and the template in this very case is then rendered useless; maybe I just missunderstood the goal of it completely. It would be nice if someone who knew how we treat (if there is even consensus about it) first attestations in this case would comment. Saumache (talk) 18:53, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

For the similar template {{defdate}} I disregard the arbitrary boundary between Middle and Modern English. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 19:16, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Is there no difference at all between the two templates? I agree with you on the issue but I'm not going to do as I please here: my query is not really about the relevance of set boundaries which are pretty much needed but if the vocabulary handed over by the different forms of English can be treated as of a single language and as such, terms in their first attestation. Saumache (talk) 19:54, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

@Saumache: pardon my ignorance, but what template are you using for the "first attestations"? It seems to me that there is very little difference between a first attestation and the date from which a definition or sense is first used, since the latter can only be determined from the former. If there are two templates, I think they should be merged into one, or one of them should be deprecated in favour of the other. — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:14, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I use {{etydate}}, which is more fit for etymology headers and {{defdate}} for single definitions, though nothing is said about such a dichotomy in either's documentation. Saumache (talk) 09:55, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Saumache: thanks. In that case I feel that {{etydate}} should be deprecated in favour of {{defdate}}. It is more accurate and useful that each sense of a term be dated using {{defdate}} rather than to have a broad statement in the etymology section that a term is first attested in a certain period, which would only apply to the earliest used sense. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:54, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Dating each sense would be a tedious task and not something I think the common editor would take on. Having it stated in the etymology header seems mandatory, the time at which the word was first uttered/written is tightly bound to its morphological origin. It is not about its earliest sense but its earliest overall usage (allbeit in a certain sense), which solely bears etymological value since other senses flow from it. Saumache (talk) 13:11, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Saumache: then you should just put the earliest attestation against the relevant sense which is the oldest using {{defdate}}. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:13, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Who knows if the original/oldest sense won't be the last in a large panel of senses. Again, I think it belongs up there in the etymology section. Saumache (talk) 13:17, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

See also: Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2024/December § Template:defdate and pre-1500 dates

Fay Freak (talk) 23:33, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Well, the problem was not resolved in this discussion and I tend to agree with those who oppose OP's proposal. Saumache (talk) 09:58, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

In general, I agree with Vox here (and also regarding defdate / the BP discussion). IMO having a bunch of entries (the, of, they, in, ...) say "First attested in 1500. From Middle English foo, attested since 1325." would be silly, and less helpful than "First attested in 1325, in Middle English, as foo." Of course, it could be argued that in such cases, when it comes to etydate, it could make sense to simply omit that "First attested..." clause and just have "From Middle English foo, attested since...". - -sche (discuss) 19:16, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

+1. For Korean specifically, we already have e.g. "First attested as Middle Korean 아옥〮 (àwók) in the Gugeupbang eonhae (救急方諺解 / 구급방언해), 下:81a^[13], 1466". With that bias in mind, this seems clearly like the most logical presentation ;-) 🌙🐇 ^{⠀talk⠀ ⠀contribs⠀} 20:24, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I think I'll start using something like "First attested in 1325, in Middle English, as foo.", it is by far the most comprehensive and complete while still being placed at the start of the etymology section, which I regard as the right place to put it at. Saumache (talk) 12:54, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

@Saumache: I think we should reach some consensus on the placement of such information first. In the past, I have actually been relocating such information out of the etymology section into the definition section using {{defdate}}. It seems counterproductive if different editors are doing opposing things. I don’t think such information relates strongly to etymology. It’s more a matter of usage, so it belongs in the definition section under each respective sense. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:08, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I understand, I am quoting what I said a little higher in this same thread: "Dating each sense would be a tedious task and not something I think the common editor would take on. Having it stated in the etymology header seems mandatory, the time at which the word was first uttered/written is tightly bound to its morphological origin. It is not about its earliest sense but its earliest overall usage (allbeit in a certain sense), which solely bears etymological value since other senses flow from it.". Saumache (talk) 13:14, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Well, I'll go on with my edits and make changes accordingly after some move is made towards solving the issue and consensus met. Saumache (talk) 11:10, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Why &lit at all?

Looking at fast one I wonder why we bother with those &lit lines at all ("Used other than figuratively or idiomatically"). Anything can be used literally: that's how language works: you put words together to form phrases. Senses like "fast one" meaning "anything that is fast" make us look pretty dumb. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:B12B:824A:E20E:ED73 23:01, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Contrast highlights that which you want to expose. Why is your belt buckle of metal or are your shirt buttons of a distinct colour when this finish could have the same dull black, brown, blue or white colour as the rest of the clothing piece? Fay Freak (talk) 23:27, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree that it’s redundant and shouldn’t be used. — Sgconlaw (talk) 23:29, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

It is redundant with foreknowledge. Editors don’t rely on readers applying grammatical rules, therefore make explicit that which readers should have thought by themselves, but might have been suppressed by the impression of the gloss of the idiomatic sense, which gives off an air of exclusivity. A motion to delete {{&lit}} would fail, expressing distrust in the discretion of our editors more than in our readers, who naturally should be distrusted more since they consult a dictionary. Fay Freak (talk) 23:42, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Indeed. Moreover, {{&lit}} might seem silly to a native speaker, but I suspect it is very useful for English learners, especially those who don't have a good grasp of the underlying construction (adj + one in this case). This, that and the other (talk) 02:31, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I always found it useful, myself, noting that phrases with literal senses can be used other than figuratively”. And if a phrase cannot be used literally, then I feel like the fact we only list the figurative sense is enough indication that it’s the only one that exists. Polomo47 (talk) 17:06, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Agreed, particularly for potentially offensive terms - if we didn't have the &lit at exotic cheroot, for instance, I would read it as implying that it's only ever a euphemism for cannabis, when Google Books does also contain examples of it being used straight to mean "a cigar from a faraway country". Similarly, sometimes tired and emotional really does mean "worn out and full of emotions" - if we didn't have the &lit, we'd be accidentally accusing a lot of people of drunkeness! Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:40, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Compare the instances where we don't use &lit, for example fried egg or police car. The use of the sense basically informs readers that there is an idiomatic sense of the phrase, but not one so baked in that it would be considered jarring to use words together to mean something non-idiomatic. bd2412 T 05:13, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Bd2412: if we were meant to infer that, I’m afraid it was lost on me. 🙂 — Sgconlaw (talk) 05:57, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I find those examples weak, preferring ground squirrel = (ground squirrel) as a more memorable example. DCDuring (talk) 19:43, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't make it a priority to go around adding &lits (although I add them occasionally), but I agree with TTO. There probably are cases where it'd be weird to use &lit — "the way out of a paper bag is through the hole in the top"? — but in a case like fast one where it's common to use the literal sense, I think the help which acknowledging the literal sense provides to the sort of people who are looking the word(s) up outweighs the "harm" to people who already know what the words mean. - -sche (discuss) 18:58, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I agree. And I believe that having &lit is helpful to a wiki dictionary because it tends to disinvite (by preempting) a certain kind of drive-by edit: one where a passerby feels the need to edit the entry only because the literal meaning was "missing" (that is, judged to be lacking from a certain predictable viewpoint). Quercus solaris (talk) 21:47, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I also agree. We currently have 338 English phrasal verb entries where {{&lit}} is used. By accounting for their literal/non-idiomatic senses in this way, we not only pre-empt the kinds of edits that you describe, but also enable these entries to serve as definition/translation targets for non-English verbs that are defined by the literally-meant English phrasal verb (e.g. виїхати, meaning literally to drive out and ride out, i.e. to drive or ride in an outward direction). Voltaigne (talk) 18:40, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Me too. Of course it's not obligatory to add "&lit", but it should be highly desirable to add it whenever there is a realistic chance that a user will come across the phrase in a literal sense. The idea of making the template depecrated is quite absurd to me. Lots of users will be misled to interpret a literal use as a figurative one if we don't remind them of that possibility. 2.201.0.103 02:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I just happened across the example of country house in John Lyons's Semantics (vol 2, p. 536) where he argues a case for something like {{&lit}}. He would probably argue that our entry is wrong to have the first sense (the supersense) in that entry, which should be &lit-ed. DCDuring (talk) 19:39, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

It deserves a thoughtful look. I may be able to rekajigger it such that the sense list is only one layer deep (i.e., # with no ##). One complication is that some country things are towner than others, literally — especially in locales where town has subsumed a bit of country over the decades and centuries — even though they remain country at heart or at the core (hardcore heartcore). You can't always take it away,^^^ lol. Quercus solaris (talk) 16:47, 18 March 2025 (UTC). Update:  Done. The entry may not yet be perfect, but it's better than it's ever yet been. That's continual improvement for yə (he slifted sententiously). Quercus solaris (talk) 17:34, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Original drill-rappin' IP: if there is a consensus on this, let's policy-ify it. Write it down. So next time you can say "ugh, newbie, you haven't read the &lit rules". Best wishes, 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:6439:7FE9:917C:AB93

Good point. I don't know where all it may be documented already, but a key place to document it would be at WT:CFI § Idiomaticity, where a link to {{&lit}} should be given. One or two sentences could say something about the pros and cons of including &lit senses, and that consensus holds that the pros outweigh the cons. I would take a crack at it myself, but I am too much of a stray cur to have edit-button privileges at the WT:CFI page. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:00, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

gregarize

Definition mentions gregaria, which isn't English. What's it supposed to mean? Ungreaaseddish (talk) 10:27, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

@Ungreaaseddish: It means author wasn’t speaking English anymore because he was in Italy. Fixed it for you. Fay Freak (talk) 11:33, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Quasi/Quasi-

Is it just me, or do the English recordings for quasi/quasi- sound like /kwæzaɪ/ & /kwæzi/ rather than any of the listed pronunciations? If so, should the audio get replaced, or should those pronunciations be added? 2600:8805:905:6C10:1472:2E92:15B9:BAD3 18:37, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Your ears need checkin' Ungreaaseddish (talk) 18:41, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

The recordings sound fine to me. — Sgconlaw (talk) 21:00, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

After coming back to it, I have no clue what I was thinking 2600:8805:905:6C10:1472:2E92:15B9:BAD3 21:02, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

— Sgconlaw (talk) 21:04, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

倍 has the wrong data in zh/data/ltc-pron

倍's data in Module:zh/data/ltc-pron is listed as "並咍一開 上薄亥" (resulting in a Baxter transcription of "bojX"). However, Kroll's A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese lists the Baxter as "bwojX". This means the data string should instead be "並灰一合 上蒲罪" (the second fanqie character picked from 琲, which is homophonous). This would result in a Baxter of "bwojX", and additionally, the autoderived Mandarin pronunciation would match the actual attested one. (The Cantonese pronunciation differs slightly because it would be the literary pronunciation, whereas what's listed in the Wiktionary entry is a colloquial pronunciation.) Iwsfutcmd (talk) 05:25, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

σμῖλαξ

definitions given for this word seem anachronistic - are we seriously meant to believe the ancient Greeks used this word for American sarsparilla vines or African black-eyed peas? Which makes me seriously doubt its use for convolvulus sp. Griffon77 (talk) 20:27, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Everyone else but us is anachronistic, since I checked plausibility of the senses when putting the current version out. Case in point you have not read much into the senses you picked up either, like all those ignoramuses glossing ancient Mediterranean beans as Phaseolus vulgaris, otherwise you would realize that I intentionally said cowpea and not black-eyed pea, for I do not rest upon Western supermarket knowledge: if the rarer term is more accurate it is granted. Fay Freak (talk) 21:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Smilax aspera is Mediterranean.

Vigna unguiculata "From there [Africa] they [cowpeas] traveled north to the Mediterranean, where they were used by the Greeks and Romans. The first written references to the cowpea were in 300 BC ", all per WP.

Convolvulus spp. are native in much of the world, including the Mediterranean, per Plants of the World Online. I haven't investigated which of the 200-250 species might be native to the Mediterranean or introduced there before classical times. There are also many genera hard to distinguish from Convolvulus in tribe Convolvuleae and family Convolvulaceae. DCDuring (talk) 21:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

It is safe to assume the most obnoxious one Convolvulus arvensis familiar to all places settled or frequented by the ancient Hellenes, the acquaintance with which weed should show Griffon77’s “serious doubt” jarring enough, and rather cast it upon his general relationship with gardening. Beyond that, the archaeological as well as philological investigation to such detail as to distinguish many species two thousand years ago would be too challenging to have been investigated.

I have already entered several old names for Convolvulus spp. in Arabic: مَدَاد (madād), لَبْلَاب (lablāb), عَصَب (ʕaṣab), عُلَّيْق (ʕullayq), سَقَمُونِيَا (saqamūniyā), رُخَامَى (ruḵāmā), بَيَاض (bayāḍ), شُبْرُق (šubruq), شُبْرُم (šubrum). Now I won’t give you the literature places for all and have to soothe guy with the assurance of a comprehensive overview being already imparted to Wiktionary, but as a beginner one can see an investigation for the bulk of living plant names in Mandaville, James Paul (2011) Bedouin Ethnobotany. Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, →ISBN, page 345 seqq., checking with a table whether modern bedouin phytonyms can be confirmed to correspond to descriptions ins 9th and 10th century plant books and thus stable since antiquity—which has peculiar likelihood for such commonly encountered species. Fay Freak (talk) 22:13, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

OK, next question, the entry follows Liddell and Scott in equating milax and smilax, but their citations don't match their assertion that milax is old and smilax is the new form. rather the trees are referred to as milos, milax, or Romanized milaces, and the vines as smilax by the same authors. is there evidence this is the same word or are they really two different words? Griffon77 (talk) 03:49, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

@Griffon77: σμῖλαξ (smîlax), μῖλαξ (mîlax), μῖλος (mîlos), σμῖλος (smîlos) are all attested in the sense “yew”, and I linked you all Dioscurides places for all senses with this lemma form, except for “holm oak”, which is apparently in Theophrastus times only “in Arcadia” either μῖλαξ (mîlax) or σμῖλαξ (smîlax), the transmission of the Theophrastus text differs here, you find many authors taking it as σμῖλαξ (smîlax) instead of LSJ’s μῖλαξ (mîlax), querying "σμῖλαξ" "Quercus", and the same text of Pliny the Elder describing milaces you find with smilax instead of milax all over in many many editions, query smilax quoque, as you say. I tend to assume like Liddell-Scott and Georges it is indeed the same word.

Note possible toponymy, Μίλητος has been contended to be from μῖλαξ (mîlax, “yew”), while in mythology Areia hid her son in a yew-tree and therefore called him, who would found the city, Miletus, acc. to a scholion to Apollonios Rhodios with varying [σ] transmission (the Wikipedia author describing Areia’s story tripped over the meaning); given that we know the city’s name in more ancient languages, this should give us a clue about the word’s Anatolian origin, since the s-mobile shows it to be Indo-European. Fay Freak (talk) 16:54, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

s-mobile occurs due to rebracketing, so it can happen any time until case endings in -os,-as,-us etc. are ellided. loanwords from non-indo-european languages are not excepted since the preceding greek word declension causes the rebracketing (adding or removing the intitial s). And Anatolia had both Indo-European and non-indo-european languages. Liddell and Scott imply this particular rebracketing occurs rather later than an indo-european core. rebracketing is characteristic of Indo-european in that it occurs so often and so early in the attested languages it can be impossible to ascertain which form is earliest. it may rarely, but not certainly occur with other case endings being appended to roots as well. Griffon77 (talk) 21:53, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

斷

Have the Middle Chinese distinction of initials d-/t- been lost in all listed languages? I know virtually nothing about Wu, where in the lemma multiple pronunciations are annotated as vernacular and literary. 物灵 (talk) 15:57, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

roentgen equivalent man

We used to have the following definition at man:

1. A clipping of "in man" or equivalent used in the CGS unit roentgen equivalent man.

I read that as saying that "man", when found in the phrase "roentgen equivalent man", is a clipping of "in man"; this probably doesn't actually merit a sense, but it seems technically correct: when people say "roentgen equivalent man", "man" is a clipping of "in man" and what they mean is "roentgen equivalent in man". However, at some point in the last year, that was changed to define man as:

1. Abbreviation of roentgen equivalent man.

I.e., an assertion that people use "man" itself as an abbreviation of the entire phrase "roentgen equivalent man". I wonder if this change was made by someone who misunderstood the definition, since the only citation provided uses "rem" (not "man") as the abbreviation of "roentgen equivalent man". I am inclined to simply remove the sense, because the current definition is mistaken (and the old definition isn't the sort of thing that should be handled as a definition of man, IMO, so I would not view restoring it as ideal, either). - -sche (discuss) 23:33, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Yup, I agree — no need to keep it; should delete. Whoever changed the def to its current form simply made a mistake. Probably in haste. As for the origins, I would bet money that the (Manhattan Project–adjacent) people who named the rem circa 1945 originally wrote a postpositive form containing a comma or dash (thus roentgen equivalent, man or roentgen equivalent–man or roentgen equivalent—man, but they were typing on a typewriter, so they would have typed roentgen equivalent-man or roentgen equivalent--man). Just like LST means landing ship, tank, with the comma included. The military was chock full of such postpositive forms, because they worked well for the logistical cataloguing of the day (and still do). Then a bunch of other people played whisper down the lane with the term and typed it with only spaces because (1) they couldn't be arsed plus (2) they didn't even think critically about the syntax within the term anyway, it was just a parroted string of words, and punctuation is for losers anyway, cuz who really carez. In my working life I have seen these forces at work. These forces are strong in many people. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:28, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

senile angioma

Why is cherry angioma also called senile angioma? Is it, perhaps, much more frequent amongst the oldest population than younger people? --2001:14BB:A8:3F90:0:0:520D:6401 18:25, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Yup, it was named for having higher incidence in older adults, although it is not at all specific to old age. Thus senile rather than senile. Some people deprecate the synonym because of needless inaptness. Quercus solaris (talk) 20:04, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

under the weather

I just randomly stumbled upon under the weather and find it's labeled with a pos of "adjective." I'm curious why it's not a phrase, or prepositional phrase even, since "under" is a preposition. It doesn't seem like it would qualify as a proverb. In general how does one decide that these three compound words together should be labeled an adjective? Thanks. Killeroonie (talk) 02:32, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

quirinalis

Someone nominated this Latin adjective for speedy deletion on the grounds that it should be capitalized. There is a usage note saying that it often is (although there's no alternative form at Quirinalis), but does the page belong at this form or the other? Ultimateria (talk) 02:45, 20 March 2025 (UTC)