Talk:octopoid

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Latest comment: 4 years ago by Kiwima in topic RFV discussion: February–March 2020
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RFV discussion: February–March 2020

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Rfv-sense "pertaining to octopods". (I would expect octopodal to have this meaning, and it does, so I've added it there.) It would also be good to clarify which sense of octopod is meant, as that entry has three senses, "1. Any animal with eight feet or foot-like parts.", "2. Any cephalopod mollusks of the order Octopoda.", "3. A railway locomotive with eight wheels." I doubt a reference to sense 2 of octopod could be distinguished from a reference to an octopus. - -sche (discuss) 22:42, 19 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

I found one citation where a spider is called octopoid, and the surrounding text suggests it is a tarantula-inspired, "normally" (non-tentacle-y AFAICT) eight-legged spider. With some other octopod words, I had luck finding citations referencing larva, or horses like Sleipnir, or collocating with the phrases "eight (legged|footed|legs|feet)", or "eight (armed|arms)", or by searching with other number-prefixed words of the same type (e.g. octopodal + hexapodal), but not here. (google books:octopoid "eight arms" turns up references to cephalopods which are octopid in having eight arms; I suppose those could be a reference to Octopoda or to octopuses.) - -sche (discuss) 19:06, 21 February 2020 (UTC)Reply
Someone interested in taxonomy (Chuck Entz? DCDuring?) could take a look at google books:"octopoid" cephalopod (and related searches, e.g. google books:"octopoid" squid) and see if they feel the various scientific texts (not the fics) there are better interpreted as meaning "octopus-like" or "octopodes/Octopoda-like". - -sche (discuss) 09:11, 23 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

RFV-resolved. Given the difficulty in distinguishing whether the word is used to mean "octopus-like" or "octopod-like" I have merged the two defintions. Kiwima (talk) 22:46, 3 March 2020 (UTC)Reply