Wiktionary:Tea room/2025/February

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"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 [1] 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: [2]. - -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)

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)

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 on uncited ones. DCDuring (talk) 15:53, 25 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"[3] 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)

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)