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From the Swedish YouTube localization, and from Googling "Swedish month abbreviations", it seems the standard way to abbreviate months in Swedish is with a dot after the first three letters (except the one for May (maj) since it's already 3 letters, with the YouTube localization also not doing ones for March (mars), June (juni) and July (juli) as they're pretty short too)
If you yourself are not sure, I think usually people just don't include the Etymology section. You could also add the section and then use{{rfe}}.
If nobody is sure and we actually don't/can't know where it came from, then you type out "Uncertain." or "Unknown." See Portuguesefuá for an example of this.MedK1 (talk)23:28, 1 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
So would it be correct to say that in the sentence “Vilna was the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” “Vilna” is a proper noun but “Jerusalem” is not?JulieKahan (talk)07:56, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
In principle any proper noun denoting a famous entity with distinctive characteristics could be used rhetorically/figuratively in this way to suggest a likeness. To cite just two among innumerable other examples,Johnny Halliday was described as "the Elvis Presley of France," andJollibee has been described as "the McDonald's of the Philippines."
We do have an entry forMecca as a noun, defined as "Any place considered to be a very important place to visit by people with a particular interest." The use ofMecca in this well-defined sense, in structures such as "the Mecca of" or "a Mecca for", is so heavily attested in so many different contexts that a noun entry is arguably warranted.
I’ve seen other places besides Vilna called “the Jerusalem of X,” so I think I might add “a center of Jewish life and scholarship” as a new definition for “Jerusalem,” and IIUC it would go under a “Noun” heading.
But I’ve seen other metaphorical uses of proper nouns that aren’t necessarily widespread enough to justify a new definition, for example:
”Carthage was a sort of niggerManchester.” (Kipling) or
“I should have gone on a pilgrimage to theBethlehem of North Korea, the village of Magyongdae where the Great Leader was born in a humble home.”
Would it be okay to just put these quotes in the existing entries for Manchester and Bethlehem?
Does the choice of article (a Manchester versusthe Bethlehem) make a difference?
(Also, am I correct in assuming that unlike with example sentences, there is no rule against using quotations that happen to include an offensive word?)JulieKahan (talk)11:44, 13 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Some thoughts in response:
The city ofWenzhou (and more broadly the province ofZhejiang) has been described as "China's Jerusalem" or "the Jerusalem of the East", on account of its relatively large concentration of Christians, not Jews.
The mere presence of an indefinite article is IMO insufficient to justify a common-noun parsing of a proper noun. It depends on the context. Advocates of "a Jerusalem for all faiths" are talking about the actual city of Jerusalem.
Guidelines on the use of quotations are to be found atWiktionary:Quotations. The page doesn't advise against offensive quotations, although IMO it's a not a bad idea to work within the spirit ofWiktionary:Example_sentences#Writing_good_examples ("Be friendly") if possible. The Kipling quote is perhaps not necessary (or even useful) to corroborate/illustrate our definition ofManchester.
No rule against offensive words in citations. We prefer citations without such distractions (where they are distractions), but sometimes good attesting citations are hard to find. In the case ofManchester it shouldn't be too hard to find a common noun usage withoutnigger.
Citations indicating common-ness would seem to be confusing under the proper noun heading, but many well-known proper nouns have common noun usage. It would not be controversial to put good citations on the citations page under a heading like "Usage as a common noun". It would help if the common noun meaning was clear. What about Carthage made it a "Manchester"? It's not obvious to most outside the UK (like me).DCDuring (talk)13:48, 13 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
fromVulgar Latin*dēcadere, etymologically restored form ofLatindēcidere(“to fall away, fail, sink, perish”)
What is the process of etymological restoration? Is it something performed by etymologists? Is it a natural process of the speakers of languages? In this case what was restored to what?DCDuring (talk)18:26, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
If you look at the page history, it was "restored" in the original etymology imported from Century 1911, and @Nicodene added the "etymologically" as a clarification. From the context, it looks like the "restoration" was from speakers at the time noticing the relationship betweendēcidere andcadere, and changing the vowel of the derived term to match the presumed source. This would be strictly among the speakers- no etymologists involved.Chuck Entz (talk)20:51, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Was this done to more clearly distinguishdecido ("fall (off), die, fail") [fromde- cado] fromdecido ("cut off, decide, etc.") [fromde- caedo]?
Classical Latindēcidere is from an archaic *dēcadere with vowel reduction of the original unstressed */a/. Later, en route to Romance,dēcidere was apparently remodelled to *dēcadere (perdē- andcadere), similar to the erstwhile archaic Latin form.
Right. It would simplify things if the English etymology contained the appropriate link and let the Latin entries carry their own water.DCDuring (talk)23:40, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for responding. I ended up using the dissertation as a reference instead. I've discovered that the citation templates are indeed rather versatile here. I'm more familiar with Wikipedia, so I expected a more specific template.–CopperyMarrow15(talk •edits)05:43, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hey! Does anyone know what the oldest language we have entries of reconstructed roots for in Wiktionary is? I’ve only ever been able to trace European words back to Proto-Indo-European, and some Middle Eastern words to Proto-Indo-Iranian, but nothing beyond anything with a Proto-Indo- prefix. Are those the oldest languages we have entries for?
Put more or less simply: you may seeProto-Afroasiatic being called the “oldest language” in some circles. It’s the oldest language that linguists have been able to reconstruct with some success, because its descendants (such as Ancient Egyptian and the Semitic languages) are attested quite a long time ago. Proto-Indo-Iranian is a descendant of Proto-Indo-European, which is the oldest reconstructed ancestor of almost all languages spoken in Europe and quite a few spoken in India / the middle East. More atw:Proto-language,w:Proto-Indo-European,w:Proto-Afroasiatic.—Polomo ⟨ oi! ⟩ ·05:28, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Ah, thank you, I wasn’t sure if whatever the ancestor of African languages was would have Wiktionary entries. Thanks for the info!
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I was looking atnmsl andNMSL. They have a soft redirect to你媽死了, using{{zh-see}}. It is clearly an initialism, which can have a sense like "initialism of你媽死了", similar toCNM. Should it not be a soft redirect then? How do we determine whether to have a soft redirect, or to create a page with sense "Alternative spelling / Alternative form of [[XX]]"?Sun8908 (talk)14:51, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
2 types of wrong word splitting in{{zh-q}} (exist identically in{{zh-x}})
Latest comment:30 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Both of the incorrect word splitting are shown in Chinese quotes, of書山有路勤為徑，學海無涯苦作舟 /书山有路勤为径，学海无涯苦作舟(shū shān yǒu lù qín wéi jìng, xué hǎi wú yá kǔ zuò zhōu) and莘莘學子 /莘莘学子(shēnshēnxuézǐ) respectively. The following quotes originally on the entries, with adjustments I desired, show my questions.
Type 1: Mistaken split in phrases with punctuations
Phrases such as書山有路勤為徑，學海無涯苦作舟 /书山有路勤为径，学海无涯苦作舟(shū shān yǒu lù qín wéi jìng, xué hǎi wú yá kǔ zuò zhōu),眼觀四路、耳聽八方 /眼观四路、耳听八方(yǎn guān sì lù, ěr tīng bā fāng,“alternative form of 眼觀六路，耳聽八方; to be observant and alert”) contain Chinese punctuations (current stopgap is to split each problematic phrase until the parts is punctuation-less). How to prevent them to split incorrectly?
Chúle xuéshēng zìjǐ de “shū shān yǒu lù qín wèi jìng， xué hǎi wú yá kǔ zuò zhōu” hái yào pèibèi shàng jiācháng de “yǎn guān sì lù, ěrtīngbāfāng” hé quánfāngwèi de fúwù lái zhùlì gāokǎo.[Pinyin]
In addition to students' ownstudying perseverance, they must also be equipped with their parents' vigilance and all-round services to assist in the college entrance exam.
Quotes with misspellings should be shown with{{sic}}, but for Chinese, when I tried to do so within the Chinese text (attempt on put{{sic}} in{{zh-q|FORM}}), the sentence cannot link properly (current stopgap is put the{{sic}} for both the Chinese and English text in{{zh-q|TRANSLATION}}). How to link all the words properly?
It’s all because of Hung Shu-yan’s video, which corruptedthousands and thousands[sic – meaninga great many](mirroring for千千 (cin1 cin1, “a great number”, literally “thousand thousand”))of students.
Latest comment:29 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Take a look at the list in the References section onmaestitia. For some reason putting Gaffiot in the bullet list makes it lose all vertical padding from the item below it, though I don’t see anything sus about that template in particular.—Desacc̱oinṯier14:39, 19 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
2 meter temperature - Is this en or Translingual? Is a frequent meteorological simulation object name in scope for Wiktionary?
Latest comment:15 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I just started editing Wiktionary, and I'm struggling to find a good description of the policy about consulting other dictionaries. I made my first edit by adding an IPA transcription toaggie, but I'm unsure of whether I violated policy by consulting another dictionary. I am a native English speaker, and my pronunciation of the word is the same as the recording already present in the entry. But since I had never edited before, I wanted to make sure that my transcription was 100% accurate, so I checkedMerriam-Webster's entry to make sure that my pronunciation was accurate. Though it was in a different transcription system, it verified the pronunciation, and I added an IPA transcription of the word to the page. Did I violate policy here by consulting another dictionary? Should I have added Merriam-Webster as a source?
My concern with sourcing goes further. I would very much like to add hyphenations to Wiktionary's English language entries, but how could I source these additions? Could I borrow from Merriam-Webster's extensive entries if I cite their entries? Where else could I find sources for hyphenations?Pipoin (talk)07:07, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
The easiest cases would be multiple dictionaries providing the same hyphenations. Other easy cases would be following some general rules of hyphenation provided by, say, the Chicago Manual of Style or the AP's. Relying on only one dictionary is suspect, though it may still be "fair use". But,IANAL.DCDuring (talk)21:45, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Of course, "Users" are why these various projects exist. If I cannoteasily find ARVN atCategory:English abbreviations, then I'm probably not the only one not knowing these "fine distinctions."
There is no sufficient reason, AFAICT, why something can't be in two "close" categories at the same time. In common parlance 'abbreviation' is inclusive of all sorts of shortenings: some folks might even want to include contractions. We can draw the line at any reasonable definition. The current criterion for membership is reasonable, but not friendly to normal users.DCDuring (talk)13:44, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:12 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I'm trying to figure out the "correct" way to handle a situation involving a new etymology+definition for an abbreviation with two capitalization variants. In parts of Massachusetts,Noho/NoHo is used to refer to the city of Northampton. My sense is that 'Noho' is more common, used for instance byw:Noho Pride. Personally I'd use that form because the 'h' is not capitalized in the original name, but a quick search found attestations of both forms.
Currently, 'NoHo' has two etymologies, and 'Noho' basically just points at 'NoHo'. If I add an etymology and definition for Northampton to Noho, my understanding ofwiktionary:ELE is that we'd end up with two etymology blocks.
But this give me pause for a few reasons.
The existing definition is {{alternative form of|en|NoHo}}., for which the etymology and the definition are basically the same thing, and I don't really know what would fill out the etymology block.
If I add a gloss of the underlying etymology for NoHo, then that's actually *two* different etymologies, so maybe it would need to be split to two different alternative form definition in order to work with the structure?
If I'm doing this should I then add a definition to NoHo that it can be an alternate form for Noho for symmetry? Well, that's kind of covered by the existing Alternate Forms header.
And at that point this is feeling kind of messy, with a lot of duplication going on.
I could instead add Northampton as an etymology+definition at NoHo, which has the nice property of keeping all the definitions for this pair on the same page. However, then I don't know how to indicate that while both versions are attested, 'Noho' may be the preferred form, or at least more likely to be used for Northampton than it is for the NYC neighborhood.
The third option is to just add Northampton to Noho, and change the existing alternative form definition to an alternative forms header. This seems like an appealing option, but I wanted to ask for opinions about the right way to handle this. Thanks in advance.Tungolen (talk)04:37, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
The citationsnamespace is usually not locked. Also you can request it in thetea room. Talk pages of entries are not likely followed (unlike on Wikipedia). Or: make an account and edit more so you can ultimately bypass the lock.Fay Freak (talk)12:15, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Preventing "...terms written in multiple scripts" category from showing?
As participles are but forms of the verb itself, though they do not share the same stem, I tend to put them under the lemma, that is,insert under Latinīnserō. People are also more likely to find them there than on a participle page (beside most English verbs not directly derived from these participles, but from the stem itself, it is more of an old borrowing rule); I otherwise put English adjectives derived from Latin participles under the respective participle.Saumache (talk)13:53, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:6 days ago5 comments4 people in discussion
The title is self-explanatory, but why is there no visual editing. There's a lot I could fill in, but I find it hard to do with source editing, though I get by. also, is there a guide or template on how to make entries? I'm wondering what the proper format is (for chinese words and the like.)AtTheTownHouse (talk)18:27, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Wiktionary uses templates much more than Wikipedia, and perhaps in more complex ways. Visual editing is really clunky with templates, which can be fine for editing WP, but it makes everything much harder over here. A better way to learn is to look at other Chinese entries and try to mimic their format and use of templates.—Polomo ⟨ oi! ⟩ ·14:20, 11 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:9 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The entries on Chinese hanzi or Japanese kanji or Vietnamese Hán Nôm or the like often useideographic description characters at the top, in the translingual section, to describe them. But, if you search for them, it only shows characters with no Unicode that have to use description characters to be described, and the article for the description characters themselves. And if you click "search for pages containing," it only brings up the article for that word. How do I find words that have been rotated or that are made through surronding?AtTheTownHouse (talk)18:36, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
