Talk:board

Board as in boarding school

I am just reading an American bestseller that invokes "board" as the place related to boarding school. I did not find this meaning listed in the article. Could someone please add that meaning to the article if indeed it should be there? Being a non-native English speaker, I am refraining from entering the definition myself. --Daniel Polansky 08:05, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

This should be added as a usage; board in this sense refers to the food. A student's tuition at a boarding school includes meals, or board. Why this definition does not include meals is beyond me. Should be added. I believe the usage comes from the OE word for table, bord akin to Old Norse borð. 66.31.208.237 21:01, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

 Done Equinox ◑ 17:37, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Deletion discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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board

3. Short for blackboard, whiteboard, chessboard, surfboard, etc.

The items above are boards (by definition 1), thus board is not "short" for them. Perhaps we should extend the first definition to include materials other than wood to make this more apparent. --WikiTiki89 19:36, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Delete, I agree. In fact I posted this separately as a mistake and reverted myself (link). Mglovesfun (talk) 19:40, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Debatable. To me, the chess sense is redundant (because every board game has a board, so termed), but the blackboard/whiteboard might not be: "he wrote it on the board" does not require context for us to think of this kind of board. Also, similar terms like cupboard and sideboard cannot be abbreviated to board. Equinox ◑ 19:41, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

That is because cupboards and sideboards are not boards (but are made of boards). --WikiTiki89 19:44, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Is that really the etymology? I thought it was from how "board" used to mean a (dining-?)table. Equinox ◑ 19:52, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

You're probably right, that's just what I assumed. Anyway, the fact that you said "used to mean" is why we can no longer call them boards. --WikiTiki89 19:54, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Definition 1? "A relatively long, wide and thin piece of sawn wood or similar material, usually intended for use in construction." That's sort of a stretch for any of them. A chessboard can be made of glass or plastic or paper or merely be data in a computer. Neither whiteboards or blackboards are wood or intended for use in construction. Maybe surfboard, though that still does seem to match #1.

The chess sense can't be redundant to the sense for board games until we have a sense for a board game board.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:41, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Added: "A flat surface with markings for playing a board game." Equinox ◑ 03:48, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

I did say we would need to generalize the first definition, because boards do not have to be wood and do not have to be used for construction. --WikiTiki89 13:26, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with the premise of the RfV. Blackboard > whiteboard and the others are not well-presented as directly following from sense 1, even as appropriately generalized. Board's senses evolved along a few lines, one including generalization to wood-like materials, another to flat, thin-ish shapes, like those in the challenged sense line.

Can the challenged sense be even be called a definition? It seems as much a list of examples of the word board ("a rigid piece of flat, thin material") being used in combination, which definition we lack. (MWOnline has "a flat usually rectangular piece of material (as wood) designed for a special purpose" with the various "-boards" above as subsenses.)

This seems much more like a cleanup candidate than an RfD candidate. DCDuring TALK 15:00, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Cleanup? Not your normal cleanup. The difficulty here is that what is undermining (deprecated template usage) board sense 3 is not simply a lousy/lazy definition. What is going on is really a distinct linguistic phenomenon, and shoehorning it into definition-making isn't the right thing, but just ignoring it isn't the right thing either.

I ran into this when I struggled with (deprecated template usage) sosh sense 2 when I was new to WT. "Sosh" is an abbreviation for numerous words/phrases that begin with "social" or the like. For example, "social security number", "social climber", "sociology", and it seems to function as an open-ended abbreviation. The same thing is going on with (deprecated template usage) board used as a combining term. And the same thing is going on with x-word for various choice of letters x. (See RfD and RfV in progress.)

I agree that what we have now is shoddy, but this kind of flexibility should be indicated somehow, with specialized non-gloss definitions, or as some kind of open-ended abbreviation, or an "implicit" snowclone. Choor monster (talk) 17:21, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with that analysis, you maybe right about (deprecated template usage) sosh/soc, but with board, there is no "shortening" going on, just lack of specificity. A "chalkboard", "chessboard", "surfboard", etc. is just a type of board and thus they can all be called boards. With sosh, you can't say that a "social security number" is a type of "sosh". --WikiTiki89 17:27, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

• Keep: I see nothing wrong with this definition. A chalkboard isn't made of wood, but even if it was, the definition "abbreviation of chalkboard" would still be an acceptable definition Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 21:09, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

  It is made of "wood or similar material". A chalkboard is definitely a board. It's more likely that chalkboard is "long" for board than it is that board is "short" for chalkboard. --WikiTiki89 21:25, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

  According to w:chalkboard, they can be made of slate stone (which was their original material) or porcelain enamelled steel, either of which are a similar material to wood. (I'm actually not sure what a similar material to wood is supposed to cover, but if it covers stone and steel, it covers about everything).--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:39, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

  The definition is not perfect yet. See google books:"stone board". --WikiTiki89 21:45, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Not all boards are made of wood. I see no reason to discuss that, and no relevance. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:49, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

• Please inspect the sets of definitions for board that professional lexicographers use to span almost all usage. (I particularly like Merriam Webster because it is online and has more structure, but any full dictionary will do.) Note the relationship of the various definitions.

In a case like this where the relationship of multiple definitions is involved, the matter cannot be resolved by a debate, though useful points can be raised in a debate. Cleanup gives license to someone to undertake a revision of multiple senses, which may be challenged of course. DCDuring TALK 23:29, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Why do we have to be so bureaucratic? It doesn't have to nominated for cleanup for someone to clean it up. --WikiTiki89 00:35, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Requests for deletion and verification (and to a lesser extent moving) are the routine serious procedures we have, which have rules to make it possible to get things done without edit wars. Only rarely are these rules ignored, usually by near-unanimous consent. DCDuring TALK 02:27, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

So nominating it for cleanup magically bypasses these rules? --WikiTiki89 02:45, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

If there is sufficient agreement that the item should not be deleted, then it is kept. If the keep is conditional on cleanup, then it goes to cleanup. Changing definition while the definition is under discussion makes the discussion more difficult. One could add definitions, but that also make the discussion harder to follow. DCDuring TALK 03:40, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

If we nominate it for cleanup, it would still be here at RFD anyway, so I don't see how that solves the problem. Anyway, I'm still in favor of deleting this sense and then cleaning up the entry. --WikiTiki89 13:46, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Kept, no consensus to delete; on to cleanup. bd2412 T 20:56, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

(Transitive and intransitive) take passengers on for journey

(Transitive and intransitive) to take passengers onto a vehicle, especially a train, boat, or airplane
This flight is now boarding.

--Backinstadiums (talk) 19:10, 4 October 2020 (UTC)