Wiktionary >Discussion rooms > Tea room

WT:TR redirects here. For guidelines on translations, seeWiktionary:Translations. For information on transliterations, seeWiktionary:Transliteration and romanization.

A place to ask for help on finding quotations or other information about particular words. The Tea room is named to accompany theBeer parlour.

For questions about the general Wiktionary policies, use the Beer parlour; for technical questions, use theGrease pit; for questions about etymologies, use theEtymology scriptorium. For questions about specific content, you're in the right place.

Pleasedo not edit section titles as this breaks links on talk pages and in other discussion fora.

Tagged obsolete with definition isThe particularsmell andtaste arising from products ofdecomposition ofanimal orvegetable substances whenburnt insealedcontainers. I like how it says "taste", as chemists used to lick stuff... anyway, is there a modern term for this?putridness is thereabouts...Vealhurl (talk)13:47, 1 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

how do you submit? where, how. i'm unfamiliar with source editing, and I don't know the process, formatting, etc. can someone show, like, a general idea of the format of a nomination and where to put itAtTheTownHouse (talk)00:09, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Wiktionary:Foreign word of the day/NominationsVininn126 (talk)00:13, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

i just went there, but when you click, it takes you to the source editor. what section, and what format?AtTheTownHouse (talk)00:53, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The button   Nominate a new word    is indeed broken. A new submission should be placed in the sectionNot ready, under the heading for the language family (Afroasiatic (not ready),Austroasiatic (not ready), ...). So if the nominated term is Chinese Pidgin English, the submission should be inserted afterCreoles and Pidgins (not ready).

A submission consists of a single line, of the form

 *{{fwotd-nom|(language code)|(term)}} ~~~~

 ​‑‑Lambiam13:52, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

• 1. Cannot (negative auxiliary); is unable to; does not have the ability to.
      Antonyms: be able to, can
      I can’t quite get it to work.
• 4.Often followed by 'be': to be logically impossible.
      Antonyms: be able to, can, have to, must
      The butler can’t be the murderer because he was in London that evening.

Does it make sense to have these as separate senses? It seems like they are the same, or at least, you can just as well use sense 4 without a followingbe ("The butler can't have murdered the heiress, because he was in London that evening.") and you can replacecan't, in either sense, withcannot a.k.a.cannot can also be used in the same senses ("The butler cannot be the murderer", "The butler cannot have murdered her", "I cannot get it to work", etc), though changingcan't tocannot makes at least some constructions sound more formal. Wedon't split the "I can't do it" vs "the butler can't have done it" type uses ofcannot, we cover them with just one sense AFAICT.- -sche(discuss)03:24, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I think sense 4 should be deleted as being SOP:can’t be =cannot be. Moreover, the definition given fails the substitionality test: *The butler is logically impossible be the murderer, .... However, I think the entrycannot should have a third sense “Be logically impossible to”, which should be reflected in the definitions ofcan't as a negative auxiliary.  ​‑‑Lambiam11:37, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

AFAICT, such a 'third sense' would have the same problem as this one, of being indistinct from sense 1. Therefore, I have only added usexes tocannot to show that sense 1 covers such things (AFAICT). I have merged sense 4 ofcan't into sense 1.- -sche(discuss)00:26, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

This looks to me like an old term forchilblains, but I'm not a doctor. Ia that correct?~2025-33291-61 (talk)08:34, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Apparently, when the terms was in use, it was not considered synonymous withchilblain: a 19th-century medical treatise treats these as different afflictions:Cold ulcers,Chilblain.  ​‑‑Lambiam13:19, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The definition ofupsot uses just one quote, taken from the song "One Horse Open Sleigh" a.k.a. "Jingle Bells".

Problem is, in theoriginal sheet music, it's two words, "up sot". There are other works from the time attempting to show dialect by using "upsot" that might be chosen; should the definition be using one that doesn't actually isn't in quite that form?~2026-39912 (talk)23:40, 2 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

This is possibly a conctraction up sot which means upsot meaning of past tense of upset is wrong this might have cited a false source (aka a source that looks like its true or shares this word but research says its not this word or its untrue), but who knows!~2026-39816 (talk)01:49, 3 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@~2026-39912 Don't read too much into the details of the sheet music: you'll notice "bob tail" and "to night" on the same page. As for whether to show it on that page: when there are alternative forms, it's perfectly acceptible to have all the quotes in the main entry. If you do have quotes in an alternative form entry, they need to match the spelling of the entry they're in, but there's no such restriction on the main entry. In other words, you can have quotes for "up-sot", "up sot" and "upsot" in theupsot entry, but only "up sot" in theup sot entry. It would be nice to have quotes for "upsot" in theupsot entry, but the Jingle Bells one is the best known, so it's a good idea to have it in the main entry, either way.Chuck Entz (talk)04:24, 3 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I'd argue the sheet music is useless for attestation. In sheet music, the primary purpose of the the text is to show you what sounds to produce when singing, not to be read in the conventional sense. The word is spaced like that becauseup andsot are different notes, and the typesetter was obviously quite lax about putting hyphens in (you'll notice a few errors, like "a-drift-ed bank" which I'm pretty sure should be "a drift-ed bank"). If the text of "Jingle Bells" appeared in a book, it would be - and is - written as "upsot".Smurrayinchester (talk)08:36, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The thing is when typing the code in Jyutping, the source cording seems to not work and im trying to figure out whythe code doesnt respond to jyutping or 粤拼!~2026-39816 (talk)01:45, 3 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

This doesn't answer your question, but is there a reason you've left the definition blank? We don't usually keep entries without definitions.---> Tooironic (talk)00:50, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

I was wondering if specific word entries may be suitable places to add information on species names which reference and/or outright use those words. So my specific example is the entry forTaeda. This word either means or hints toward pines in its etymological roots and subsequent descendants. A specific pine tree, the loblolly pine, uses this name in its specific epithetPinus taeda. That being said, the original word was referring to a different species native to the range of ancient Greece, likely Aleppo Pine, Black Pine or Stone Pine. Interestingly there is a genus of moths native to South Africa by the same name "Taeda". As of yet I have no idea why the taxonomists/systematists who named this insect used that word, but I thought it would be cool to find out and reference back here.~2026-54943 (talk)16:47, 3 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

AFAICT,taeda inPinus taeda was used by Linnaeus to refer to the notably resinous nature of the species, which made it a good torch. I think our Latin entry as it is covers that. It might be nice if it also had a definition that referred to the possible species referred to in classical Latin or Greek (Pinus combra,per Lewis & Short, IMO an error forPinus cembra). But, as the modern range ofP. cembra is more northerly than Italy or Greece, other species of resinous trees should be on the list of possibilities.DCDuring (talk)18:10, 3 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@~2026-54943 For the moth genus, you can find the original publication of the namehere (it’s in Latin). However, Wallengreen doesn’t give an etymology, which was common in the 18th century.~2026-65682 (talk)08:52, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

IMOTaeda spp. (slug moths; familyLimacodidae) got the name from their bright colors. Though the dominant color is green, it is bright and accompanied by white spots (sparks?) with some brown or orange markings.DCDuring (talk)17:21, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

INaturalist has nearly 90 images of five species ofTaeda; Commons has one.DCDuring (talk)17:28, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Strange that earlier today I ran acrossQuercus faginea (type of oak) versusfagineus (beech) and then I read this thread later the same day. Another instance of the theme of "A specific [tree] uses this name in its specific epithet / That being said, the original word was referring to a different species".Quercus solaris (talk)06:39, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I've replaced the image atQuercus faginea of a fairly distant leafless Portuguese oak with a photo of leaves of the species. They are notably beech-like. It is often helpful to understand both specific epithets and vernacular names of organisms to have an image of that kind. Pictures of a tree from 100 yards or more away are not very helpful. Botanical drawings can be helpful for understanding multiple features of a tree any of which might have contributed to the choice of specific epithet.DCDuring (talk)17:01, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Current def: "Tobring about somethinggood as aresult ofpasteffort oractions." I think it needs to be fixed (or usage-noted) to indicate that this is used for somebody's work or action ("her efforts paid dividends") and not for a person (NOT "she paid dividends").~2026-65862 (talk)09:06, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Consider "Being good looking paid dividends."DCDuring (talk)18:49, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Seeshit#Noun sense 15: "A fart, especially a wet fart that leaves skid marks (i.e. shit stains) in one's underpants".User:Leasnam added this, in response to edits atfor shits and giggles, where he also suggests it means farts (which I doubt!). Can we confirm?~2026-65862 (talk)14:32, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I would add, prior to the creation and widespread acceptance ofshart in the 1970's and 80's, the term meaning to "shart" was simplyshit (as in to "shit one's drawers"). I still hear it used by older folks today. Toshit one's drawers doesn't always mean todefecate in one's pants. It just means to fart so much as to leaveshit stains in your underwear. So in the phraseshits and giggles it's not referring to defecating and then giggling as a result of it, butfarting and laughing about it.Leasnam (talk)14:47, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

If you leave stains then excrement has emerged from your anus. Having excrement emerge from the anus is by definition shitting (it might be diarrhoea or whatever, but there's no rule saying that liquid shit isn't shit). I am inclined to RFV this now.~2026-65862 (talk)22:54, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I agree. I believeshit encompasses any amount of shit, even only a little, although if there is some cohort of users or uses of this word that consistently mean only a little, staining bit a shit, it'spossible that might make sense as a subsense... I'm not sure how such a meaning would be demonstrated and distinguished from the general sense, but maybe at RFV someone can think of ways.- -sche(discuss)00:18, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

User:LunaEatsTuna can you weigh in, as the resident expert?~2026-65862 (talk)00:24, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I *know* people who call farting "shitting", so if they heard you farting they'd tell you to stop shitting your pants. Inshits and giggles they're not talking about excreting turds. It's notturds and giggles orpoops and giggles. It's a fart (shart). A shart is a fart.Leasnam (talk)00:27, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

And just for some context, this began as an edit to the Etymology atfor shits and giggles which reads:

From the act ofshitting (i.e.farting) and thengiggling as a result of it.

which was changed to

From the act ofshitting (i.e.defecating) and thengiggling as a result of it.

The change doesn't make sense...no one defecates then giggles (?)Leasnam (talk)00:50, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I have truly no idea where Leasnam is getting any of the information suggested in this thread. Can a source be posted for confirmation?Hftf (talk)01:03, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Okay, not an easy find, but:

2020, St John Karp,Quake City:

I hate that guy. He needs to lay off the cheese or something because he's alwaysshitting farts so hard I'm surprised he doesn't blow out the back of his pants.

2016, R.J. Torbert,No Mercy: A Powers and Johnson Novel, page316:

Ken Anker broke the silence and spoke through the bars. "Whoever isshitting their pants, please stop.” "Sorry," Sysco replied." It must be the food they serve here.”

2008, Norman A. Richards,What Do Women Gossip About?, page35:

Of course, the farter does not dislike the smell of his own doing, but anybody else's fart, "Katey, bar the doors" and shouting, "Whoshit?"

2016, Anna Smith,Rough Cut: Rosie Gilmour 6:

'You should have seen her, Rosie. I think Gordy got such a fright, it washim whoshat it.' Nikki chortled. 'I nearly lost it,' Julie said.

And of course, there'sshits and giggles(“farts and giggles”), because children giggle when they fart. They don't giggle when they shit.Leasnam (talk)04:20, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the provided attestations. I admit as someone who has never before (knowingly) heard this (rare?) sense it was hard to believe even on first read of them. However, I still don't know that it proves the fart theory of which sense is used in "shits and giggles".Hftf (talk)04:25, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Leasnam: You're taking this "shit" very literally when you say "shits and giggles" must be about farting. Quite possibly the original phrase was "forkicks and giggles" (nobodykicks people when they laugh either: it's not literal!) and someone changed "kick" to "shit" to make it ruder, as has been done with many phrases. (Update: thanks for the citations above: indeed might be something there!)~2026-12399-6 (talk)22:47, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Usually alterations work the other way round, from rude to cleaner (shits >kicks), but either is possible in this case. The change made [here] was from shits="farts" to shits="defecating" (which seems way off, sincedefecating is pretty literal). I've already updated the etymology atfor shits and giggles.......please have a look (if you haven't yet)Leasnam (talk)22:51, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Leasnam: Great if you could add your cites to theshit entry (which I am certainly not allowed to edit). Do you have anynoun examples?~2026-12399-6 (talk)23:08, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

If I cannot find any I will remove it (shits and giggles was my primary justification for the noun, and that itself is uncertain now). It was a lot of work finding those above, but if I come across any later I will certainly add !Leasnam (talk)23:14, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

In the hopes this is helpful, here's my 2p --

• The 2020 quote is unambiguously using the verbshit with the object nounfart. This is entirely new to me; I've never before encountered this use of the verbshit. My subjective impression is that this implies someone intentionally straining and forcing out farts, much as one might try to force out a turd, rather than just flatulating of their digestion's own accord.
• The 2016 and 2008 quotes are ambiguous -- the use ofshit here might be a deliberate exaggeration to emphasize the bad smell.
• The 2016 quote is unclear -- in"it was himwhoshat it", we don't have enough context to know what "it" refers to. Might even refer metaphorically to a failure, rather than something literally emerging from someone's anus.

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig}23:33, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

It surprises me that French Wiktionary does not listragequitter as a verb, but does list an invariableragequit. should we add this? if so, how is it used? is it only used after an auxiliary verb? or can French use invariable verbs with all six persons, and just not put the inflections on?—Soap—22:44, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I googled for "a ragequitté" and found plenty.~2026-65862 (talk)22:46, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

hmm thanks, but i guess what i'd be more interested in is forms using it invariably. we already list it as a regular verb .... is there alsoil a ragequit treating it as an un-conjugable loanword? as the French Wiktionary implies. i meant to say up above that the reason the French Wiktionary surprises me so much is thatquitter is already a French verb, and in fact both morphemes in thsi word are French, so i'd find it odd for them to treat it as a fixed-form loanword (as fr.wikt implies) rather than an ordinary naturalized French verb, as we currently state.—Soap—23:09, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I just asked a native speaker. He said: yes, it can be invariable, and his son uses it that way! This only happens for borrowed words and not native French words. But even borrowed ones usually have inflections (e.g.upgrader). It might be used in any verbal "situation", person, tense etc. (il eut fallu que tu ragequit) but he considers thismoins élégant than using the inflected form.~2026-65862 (talk)23:37, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Are these the same thing? Chemical compounds in-in and-ine almost always are. But if so, that's anything but clear from the definitions!~2026-65862 (talk)22:53, 4 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I looked into this pair in several general and chemical dictionaries and came to the conclusion that most likely what happened (anytime circa mid-19th through mid-20th c) is that these words were independently coined on the same surface analysis (i.e.,punicus/punicum +-in/-ine, concerningpomegranates or colors similar to their color) by different chemists at different times and places, which is why there are at least three senses of these words:punicine aspelletierine,punicin aspelargonin, andpunicine as a purple oxidation product of colorless juices from shellfish. I would bet that this same theme (i.e., "independently coined on the same surface analysis by different people at different times and places") will probably explain other instances of-in/-ine semantic distinction, too, when they rarely are encountered.Quercus solaris (talk)06:59, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Diff redefined acontinent from being set apart "bywater orgeologicalfeatures" to being set apart "bywater oristhmuses (and alsoisthmi)". How do people feel about this? Europe and Asia, for example, are set apart partly by mountains, not isthmuses or isthmi. AFAICT there could be a basis for having a definition ofcontinent as a separate landmass set apart by water, and indeed perhaps then subsenses for each of the various other specific definitions people use if they are counting or not counting the Americas, Afroeurasia, etc, as one or many continents, but I'm not seeing a basis for having the main definition allow isthmuses (and thus North vs South America) while excluding other geological features (and thus Europe and Asia). (I restored "geological features" on this basis, but the editor undid my edit.)- -sche(discuss)17:13, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The previous single definition seems to better reflect the ambiguity. The inclusion of "nearby" islands is another ambiguity. Multiple definitions seem to risk making the entry encyclopedic. Can we rely on WP to cover all this? How does this intersect with our category system, which may enshrine one set of names and thereby one definition?DCDuring (talk)17:27, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I agree with DC that the previous definition was better. It helps to remember that the division into continents is ultimately quite arbitrary. Just suppose we discovered a nearby planet similar to earth, with land and water, there is no way any definition could be used to determine the "correct" division into continents.Imaginatorium (talk)18:30, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Old anatomical term. Is there a modern-day term for this? Or do biologists not care bout this any more?Vealhurl (talk)20:33, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Plenty of hits on Google Scholar, mostly referrng to "eparterialbronchi". Not just old ones, either- some from this decade.Chuck Entz (talk)07:50, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Yuenyeung is a beverage mixingHong Kong-style milk tea and coffee. Why or why not the entries of all languages (such as鴛鴦) belongs categories Category:en:Coffee, Category:en:Milk, Category:en:Tea (same deduction apart English)?Beefwiki (talk)10:18, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Equatorial Guinea recently changed its capital fromMalabo toCiudad de la Paz (the change occurred a few days ago). This will likely affect a lot of international entries, like the translations in various languages. I recommend some cleanup if anyone has the time.~2026-11782-1 (talk)14:25, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

This is an Indonesian adjective defined as "as free as". I don't see how that can be an adjective, although admittedly I don't know Indonesian. Can we clear it up, perhaps with a usage example added?~2026-12399-6 (talk)02:13, 7 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

it has no definition but I found onhere that it is an ancient form of 諧. I'm not the best at writing entries (with all the templates, bolding, standards), so if someone could find the proper way to put this entry in (and if Baidu is reliable enough), I'd be grateful.AtTheTownHouse (talk)03:23, 7 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

oh, and also, I've been using zi.tools. it's of much help. I haven't found a word it can't solve.AtTheTownHouse (talk)18:25, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Discussion moved fromWiktionary:Beer parlour/2026/January#Girlfriend.

Hello. Personality, i don't think the CNN citation on the Girlfriend page is a good one because it's pretty much a guilt trip.~2026-10317-9 (talk)02:34, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Also, it IS possible to have a very healthy relationship even if both call each other boyfriend and girlfriend.~2026-10317-9 (talk)02:39, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

WT:Tea room is a more appropriate discussion board for this topic. I'm moving it there.TranqyPoo [💬 |✏️]03:16, 8 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

It looks like a valid citation. Whenther it is aguilt trip or not is immaterial.DCDuring (talk)16:21, 8 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Is the IP’s problem with the quote that saysReferring to someone as your boyfriend or girlfriend suggests several things about your relationship? No shit. I think it suggests that the person isA female partner in an unmarried romantic relationship.

Whatever their issue is with the CNN article, there’s nothing remotely objectionable in the quote we use. And even if there were, it probably wouldn’t warrant removing it.—Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ ·03:59, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I think IP is referring to the 2015 cite (another CNN one) about Hugh Hefner's Playboy bunnies. But the 2024 one is a mention, not a use, so rather a poor choice.~2026-16952-9 (talk)04:02, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Pretty sure it’s not less of a use just because of the verb “refer”; and if it is, it’s still illustrative... The IP saidAlso, it IS possible to have a very healthy relationship even if both call each other boyfriend and girlfriend.—Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ ·04:06, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

My problem with citation (the 2024 one) is that it kind of says that if you do that, you are bad.~2026-10317-9 (talk)19:22, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

No, it doesn’t. It saysonly that doing sosuggests several things and thatmore straight couples are calling each other partner, which as far as I can tell are both objectively true observations. If you read the full article and came to some other conclusion, that’s irrelevant to what the quote on the Wiktionary website actually includes.—Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ ·19:24, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

We include the /ˈfænʃɔː/ one, but the linked Wikipedia article suggests it might be a myth.~2026-16952-9 (talk)23:31, 8 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

All the Wikipedia article says is that one line of the Featherstonehaugh family doesn't use that pronunciation. I think this might be a weird case where born-Featherstonehaughs pronounce the name more or less as spelled, but those who adopt the name use /ˈfænʃɔː/.Constance Featherstonhaugh seems to be a "Fanshaw", as are the members of theFeatherstonhaughs dance troupe.Smurrayinchester (talk)10:50, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

We havegreat gun(“important person”) andgo great guns(“do well; move quickly”), but we're missing something that would cover things likethis:blowing great guns,running great guns, etc ... which raises the question of whether we should merely add an adverb section togreat guns, or re-evaluatego great guns asgo +great guns.- -sche(discuss)00:11, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I have added an adverb section togreat guns and converted at least sense 2 ofgo great guns to an &lit.- -sche(discuss)17:51, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Good resolution, I think.DCDuring (talk)18:36, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

MWOnline has entries for bothgo great guns (as a phrase) andgreat guns (as an adverb). Their adverb has two senses, including one for the sense we retain atgo great guns.DCDuring (talk)18:40, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Would you agree with my defining “attendance” here as “maid service?” (The speaker is taking up lodgings in someone’s house.) Is this sense dated and/or regional?

JulieKahan (talk)10:38, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I think we'd need more examples to be sure of what was meant.DCDuring (talk)18:41, 9 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I think it's sexualVealhurl (talk)18:45, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Then why would he bring up cooking in the same sentence? I've heard ofbreakfast in bed, but...Arlo Barnes (talk)22:13, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

If the definition is added without three citations, it will go through the RfV process to find three citations, if they exist.DCDuring (talk)23:35, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

• It seems about right, although I think it's a little more general. Male servants can also provide attendance, and it also appears in discussions of hosting or table service, in the sense of delivering food and drink and seeing that the person's desires are met. Most often colocated withpersonal. A few more cites:

• 1883, Charles Stanton Devas,Groundwork of Economics, page97:

  […]the labour of a nurse, or valet, or lady's-maid, is mainly in the shape of personalattendance and ministration […]

• 1885, Canada. Parliament, quoting Justice Strong,Sessional Papers, page60:

  [A vintner] providesattendance and the place in which it is to be consumed, whereas a shopkeeper is expressly prohibited by his license from doing so.

• 1895,To-day, page246:

  If I go into a restaurant I enter into a contract with the proprietor. He virtually says, "For so much I will give you food, accommodation, and provideattendance that will prevent you from troubling to go into the kitchen and taking the vegetables out of the saucepans."

• 1896, Sir Adolphus William Ward,Chaucer, page64:

  Posts of this kind, which involved the ordinary functions of personalattendance-the making of beds, the holding of torches, the laying of tables, the going on messages, &c.-were usually bestowed upon young men of good family.

• 1899,Burdett's Hospitals and Charities, page659:

  Object: To provideattendance and nursing for poor married women in their own homes during their confinements

Smurrayinchester (talk)11:54, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Definitions, references and descendants all look very dubious. For example, Latinaethos, the first entry I came across, had reference templates that were 100% wrong because none of the referenced works had entries for the word (not entirely impossible with well-meaning editors who don't realize how those work). But I become more concerned seeing there's a long list of supposed descendants that have no entries, and that don't look very likely to be real to me. The supposed etymon,ἀήθως(aḗthōs), is similar: while I can find some dictionaries that mention this as word, the definition is wrong: the editor here defined it as a noun meaning "void" whereasBailly 2024 andLSJ define it as an adverb meaning "unexpectedly".

I'm wondering if we have for whatever reason attracted an editor who's using AI to create fake entries. The entries seem to be created by one-off temporary accounts, but I imagine that they're the work of some single agent. Rather than trying to fix these one-by-one, I think there needs to be some investigation into who is making these, and if their mistakes can only be explained by reckless disregard for accuracy: I'm concerned about how much further this might go.Urszag (talk)14:52, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Anything I want to say about these temporary accounts and the IP who createdeutho probably violates policy in some way, so maybe @Chuck Entz can tell us about these andUser:Psiyana.

IP edits from the range who createdeutho arehere. I don’t see anything to be concerned about coming from temporary accounts under that range.

Hopefully that helps in seeing how deep the hole goes. Not very deep, I don’t think.—Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ ·19:41, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

By the way, how are we going about giving the ‘temp account IP viewer’ hats? Wikipedia doesn’t seem too strict about it. Maybe we can just put users who ask for it in theWT:WL, like usual?—Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ ·19:45, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The Perseus templates have massive tables on the backend that tie together the headwords with links to the works that have entries on them. If they're placed on a page that matches a headword in the tables, the correct template will link to the correct place in the right work without any parameters. That might lead someone to think that they can just copy the templates from another entry and they'll work the same way. As for the rest,ἀήθως(aḗthōs) was created in November by a logged-in user with no edits aside from the three on the entry, then edited the next day by an IP geolocating to Yonkers, New York who also created the entries forαέθος(aéthos) andeutho, as well as adding Proto-Hellenic*weûthōs as a descendant at Proto-Indo-European*h₁weh₂-. The entry foraethos was created two months later by an temporary account. Even if they are all the same person, as the behavioral evidence suggests, there's no deceptive use of separate accounts to break the rules. That means we can't use the checkuser tool to confirm, and we can't comment on the geolocation of the temporary accounts, either way.

As for whether AI is involved, we had someone who was creating bogus entries in Semitic languages years ago with a similar level of sophistication long before AI chatbots were available.Chuck Entz (talk)20:03, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Ah! The CheckUser policy still eludes me.—Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ ·20:07, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Blocked and nuked - this isUser:Ertghjia/User:Eirtchyia/User:Capybara jaxzuki, who added fake plurals before and now apparently decided to add a full-on hoax word. —SURJECTION^{/ T/ C/ L/}20:30, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I was looking earlier at the contribs of the accounts and IPs that edited those entries, and could swearthat's where I foundthis diff (in one of those user-contributions lists), though I can no longer find the connection. In any case, that diff added a source to and changed the etymology, but the name of the source seems to be misspelled (I can find the work itself if I spellstatut without thee), and as Urszag said, that kind of mistake could either be innocentor could be indicative of sloppiness and a sign that the reference is also being misrepresented: whether or not it's from the same editor, is anyone able to check if the reference supports the text it's being cited as supporting?- -sche(discuss)01:39, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

That’s from Equinox (surely we’re allowed to say this? WMF save me...)—Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ ·01:43, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello! I was hoping for some help in creatingAppendix: Proto-Australian reconstructions, on the model ofAppendix: Proto-Pama-Nyungan reconstructions. Specifically I need some guidance on these points:

• I have a specific source (Harvey and Mailhammer 2024) but AFAICT I need to create a template to reference it. I don't know how to create a referencing template on Wiktionary.
• I don't know if I need some kind of language code. I know that ISO sets aus for Australian languages, but as far as I'm aware there's no code for Proto-Australian.

Could some more experienced editors please point me in the right direction? Thank you!Ikuzaf (talk)21:02, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Ikuzaf at the moment Wiktionary doesn't accept an "Australian" family, so the code that would be used for Proto-Australian (aus-pro) doesn't work. A code isn't required for what you want to do, though. Nor is a reference template, since there will only be a single appearance of the reference - just write the reference out in normal wikitext.

Aside from the technical aspects, @-sche might have some comments on whether what you're planning to do is a good idea.This, that and the other (talk)06:53, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

It took me a bit, but I tracked down the old discussion that led to Wiktionary deprecating "aus", which turns out to have beenjust a tiny discussion more than a decade ago consisting of me and the user who was at the time Wiktionary's other go-to expert on language families agreeing based on the state of linguistic knowledge about Australian languages back then that they hadn't been shown to be a genetic rather than merely geographic grouping. Certainly, a decade later and with new developments in the field, we should have a new discussion, though it will be prudent to examine how Harvey and Mailhammer's paper is being received, and whether other scholars of Australian languages are convinced that it demonstrates a genetic grouping and provides persuasive reconstructions of the proto-language (in which case it could make sense to revive the codeaus and have a code foraus-pro), or not (in which case, as TTO says, it might only be appropriate to create an appendix with "bare text" and without needing to give Proto-Australian a language code).- -sche(discuss)20:35, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks very much for your help on this! My feeling is that Harvey and Mailhammer's work may or may not be reviewed favourably in the longer run, but given that it's built on something that was published in 2017, it's reliable enough that the proposal should be documented, even if it ends up being substantially revised with new proposals put forward. An analogy I would use is Alpher's 2004 reconstructions of Proto-Pama-Nguyen lemmas, which Harvey and Mailhammer themselves use, while also noting that they fall short of a full reconstruction of the language, or Dixon's "Proto-Australian" from 1980, which everyone treats as Proto-Pama-Nyungan. I will create the appendix as a first step and we will see where we get to.Ikuzaf (talk)20:53, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

His fingers wereon the short side. (~ somewhat short, shorter than average, short enough to be noticeably so but not extremely so)

How should this be handled? Skimmingside, I don't see a corresponding sense and can't think how to word a definition. I suppose this is a snowclone but it's also absent fromAppendix:English snowclones.

Thoughts?Kedymera (talk)02:14, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

This is sense 7 ofside (“one possible aspect of a concept, person or thing”). Not sureon the […]side needs a separate entry. —Sgconlaw (talk)02:47, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

For all the common cases ofon the X side, the expression might make a wonderful collocation for some sense ofX, eg,credit, safe, debit, bright, distaff, fat, thin, heavy, plus, especially the first three.DCDuring (talk)14:35, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The formyapay zeka is cited as a "common misspelling", though quoted searches on Google bring up 55,100,000 and 26,800,000 hits for "yapay zekâ" and "yapay zeka" respectively. It also seems somewhat inconsistent that e.g. "kağıt", "kafir" (kâfir) and "sükun" (sükûn) aren't marked as misspellings. What should be done?

Note: Perhaps it would've been more appropriate to open this discussion aboutzekâ instead. Oh well, I haven't slept in a while.Nataliemeoww (talk)18:49, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Sense 11, added indiff, is:

11.A word to mark a spoken phrase as imaginary.

What if he says "Oh, I need to see your ID"?

Is that whatoh is doing in that sentence? I would interpret that use ofoh as sense 5.- -sche(discuss)22:23, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

You're right. No, that is not whatoh is doing in that sentence. Sense 5 is what it is doing.Quercus solaris (talk) 22:39, 11 January 2026 (UTC) The alleged sense 11 is trying to claim that "he" is marking his own utterance as imaginary. This is misguided.Quercus solaris (talk)22:40, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I would have thought thatwhat if conveys the hypothetical andoh would mean whatever was appropriate for the hypothetical speaker.Ohmight function to mark off the quoted sentence, making it clear thathe is theI in the quote, not the person sayingWhat if[…]? Lots of pause-fillers etc., could serve the dual role.DCDuring (talk)01:07, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Yes,oh is aw:phatic expression whose function in this context is to signal a dispreferred response. The semantic content is minimal, it's thepragmatic function that is doing all the work.Ikuzaf (talk)05:48, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Acknowledging here a corollary to what DCDuring said above: Yes, one could punctuate the [former] usex differently, to become, "What if he said, oh, 'I need to see your ID'?" It is possible that whoever created [the former] sense 11 and its [former] usex was confused and that something they heard in speech (aural utterance) misled them as to how to write it down (written utterance). (ESL?) But anyway, as it was written, it was flawed, and I agree with the removal that was done.Quercus solaris (talk)19:14, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Belatedly circling back toTalk:me#EN: one-word response to question, "Me!":
We have, atme,

• 2. (sometimes proscribed) As the complement of the copula (be).Who said that? —(It was) not me.
• 3. Used for the pronoun in isolation or in apposition.Who's there? —Me.Who did this? —Me. I did it. (≈ It was me. I did it.)

As noted in the talk page discussion, other pronouns can be used this way too, but we seem to lack corresponding senses athim,them,her, etc. Before I edit those entries, I want to check that people feel that the way this is presented atme is the best way to be presenting this; for example, is it correct that we have two definitions, one for "Who did this? It was me." and another for "Who did this? Me.", or should those be combined?- -sche(discuss)19:56, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Without looking into this deeply, it seems that some of the various uses of "oblique"me could be combined.DCDuring (talk)21:31, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I like what I see atw:Oblique_case#English, which usesme as the sole example. Presumablyus,them,him, andher could get similar, not justpari passu, treatment.DCDuring (talk)21:31, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I have tentatively combined the two senses above, and then added a corresponding sense tohim andthem; we have a sense like this, but worded to refer tome, atus. I would like to also add one toher, but it currently lumps everything into one sense, so splitting it will take more time. I also qualified the "now him and the boys are threatening to ..." sense as uncommon, as I noted it was in2023, and added a sense corresponding to it tothem. At some point we should try to sync the various pronoun entries, i.e. make sure that senses that any pronoun can have (but that are currently only covered in some entries) are covered in all entries.- -sche(discuss)21:09, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Consulting my own idiolect, I found that my preferences for usingme are very sensitive to smallish differences in the grammar and thathim,her,them, andus don't work the same asme. This might be due to school-learned ego suppression: "Don't say I so much."DCDuring (talk)02:23, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Can the /t͡ʃitlɪnz/ pronunciation for this term be verified? I've only heard /t͡ʃɪtlɪnz/ before, and I think the pronunciation may have been added in error, but I'd like to verify.Horse Battery (talk)23:36, 13 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Seems like an error to me, too, introducedhere by a user who made only 34 edits.- -sche(discuss)21:11, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The IP asked, should there be dots in the chemical formula? If so, why?Vealhurl (talk)00:41, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The dots are inherited verbatim from at least the OCRd version of Webster 1913 (e.g.,https://www.websters1913.com/words/Carbanil).I tried to check whether the dots are an OCR artifact or a faithful reflection of the original typeset characters, but I am having trouble finding scans of the typeset pages (why are those so hard to find for a very-long-since-public-domain work? Everyone and their mother has the OCRd text, but no one seems to offer any scans of the typeset original for some God-forsaken inexcusable reason). If the dots existed in the typeset original then they apparently represent merely an archaic notation. I figured out what I was doing wrong regarding finding GBS scan of typeset original, and I checked it,^ and the original had raised dots (middots), CO·N·C₆H₅. I think that one of the ways that chem-nerds today could write the chemical formula would beOCN-C₆H₅ (or also C₇H₅NO or PhOCN) — but some chem-nerd can correct me if they wouldn't write it that way.Quercus solaris (talk)05:02, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

• cumidine has them too--~2026-12941-7 (talk)13:20, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I believe the audio pronunciation on theforegoing page is a perfect example of the pronunciation offorgoing, and is not at all an example of the pronunciation offoregoing. I would put the emphasis on the first syllable inforegoing. --Geographyinitiative🎵 (talk)11:14, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

That's an interesting point that I hadn't thought about consciously before, and I can tell that many other people have failed to think about it consciously, too, by looking at the pronunciations that MWC and MWU (online versions) give (as of this writing). This pair of words is famous for being homophonous and thus inviting spelling mistakes (even to the point that some people give up on prescribing a spelling difference and just claim that one spelling can be a variant for the other, as opposed to an error, but that choice is unpopular among people who pride themselves on their spelling); but prosodically there cansometimes be a phonic difference between them because the speaker may choose to stress the "fore" in "foregoing", most especially in attributive position (versus predicative or nominalized position). MWC and MWU don't even mention the first-syllable-stress variant at all for "foregoing", but AHD covers it as a second-listed variant. Something that is certain is that AmE often does not use it but sometimes does; and I can tell that people tend to use it in part to try to optimize semantic clarity in speech.Quercus solaris (talk)15:25, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The OED indicates that both a stress on the second syllable and a stress on the first syllable are used. The form with the stress on the first syllable is listed first, indicating (I believe) that it is more common. —Sgconlaw (talk)23:50, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for looking into this, I'm absolutely shocked that "foregoing" can be pronounced with emphasis on "go". I can't believe it! --Geographyinitiative🎵 (talk)00:25, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I’ve always pronounced it with the primary stress on the second syllable, and most people I’ve encountered seem to do so as well. —Sgconlaw (talk)10:55, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

That's really interesting, because I would consider that pronunciation for 'foregoing' to be a funny mistake if someone said it. For instance, if you said "foreGOing documentation", I would think you're trying to avoid paperwork rather than refer to previous documents. I just didn't know this pronunciation was a possibility for 'foregoing'. You know, I'd like to see if we can get a news anchor clip or some YouTube video with someone saying 'foregoing' with emphasis on the 'go'. I will look for one. UPDATE: whoa, I'm now seeing that even the spellings 'foregoing' and 'forgoing' are almost completely interchangeable in common usage, fascinating! --Geographyinitiative🎵 (talk)10:58, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Ha ha, yeah. The following is probably just preaching to the choir, but I typed it out for my own expository satisfaction: That pair is often a sore point among English speakers who are talented with English [standardized] spelling (that is, have "the eye for it" to a high degree, by nature). They get annoyed when they see those spellings flopped/switched. Much like withtheir/there/they're andit's/its. The knee-jerk reaction is a [flawed but gut-driven] perception of glaring stupidity of the writer. But there seem to be just as many, maybe even more, people who areliterate but don't have a good eye for spotting that flopping (as opposed to a mediocre eye for it). Even the ones with a sharp eye for it can flop them rarely when typing distractedly at warp speed, which proves that no brain is wholly immune to it. No doubt a similar phenomenon occurs in other languages with nonphonemic orthographies. Those of us with a knee-jerk reaction of "such misspellings are a neon sign indicating stupidity" need to continually remind ourselves that poor spellers are often/usually smart in various other dimensions, so the spelling thing doesn't actually equate to 'dumb' despiteseeming/feeling to our brains like itshould equate. Another layer beyond all this is that English spelling so often doesn't eventry to be phonemic, even among well-accepted/standard spellings (let alone others), that the people with mediocre eye for homophone spelling errors point out a compelling point: why the fuck should it matter anyway? Why not just declare them a pair of variants, like the umpteen-thousand pairs of variants that are well accepted? There's no good counterargument except the somewhat feeble fact that to someone with this "eye" for spelling, itfeels annoying somehow, by gut feeling. I guess the poor spellers are like, "yeah but fuck your feelings tho, you need to get over this one" [a corner case], lol.Quercus solaris (talk)16:40, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

"At the time the will is written." This does not seem distinct from sense 1: "present; current". I take the point that the current wife might be a different person (remarriage) at the time the will isread, but in general "now" should be interpreted as the time something iswritten, because that is when the word was actually used.~2026-28366-2 (talk)13:20, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Interesting! As a non-lawyer, I would find a will saying "I leave 20 pounds to my now wife"or "I leave 20 pounds to my current wife" or "I leave 20 pounds to my present wife" to all be sufficiently possible to argue about that I would expect a lawyer would prefer some unambiguous wording like "I leave 20 pounds to whoever I am married to at the time of my death" vs "I leave 20 pounds to the person who is my wife at the time of this writing". But if "now" is (or was: it's labelled "archaic") accepted by lawyers as specifically meaning only one of those possibilities, and thus as being perfectly unambiguous, then that might indeed be worthy of a sense like this, especially if that applies only tonow. (OTOH, if it is merely lawyerly convention to regardany such word, whethernow orcurrent orpresent or whatever else, as meaning "at the time the will is written" rather than "at the time the will is read", or vice versa, then it might be argued that no one of the words idiomatically has a separate sense. I don't know.) @BD2412,Theknightwho, what do you think?- -sche(discuss)21:43, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

As a lawyer I would definitely read "I leave 20 pounds to my now wife" to mean "I leave 20 pounds to the person who is my wife at the time of this writing, even if they are no longer my wife at the time of my death". I am aware of no legal convention which would make "now" mean anything different, but I would agree that this is not a separate sense from #1.bd2412T22:59, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I don't know if the wordnow has some special sense in U.S. law, but it does not in English common law or systems derived from it. —Sgconlaw (talk)23:47, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I can certainly think of scenarios where "now" might refer to the time of reading, but none relevant to law. With wills in particular, the whole point is to to accurately encapsulate someone's wishes, which is why there are two witnesses (in the UK, anyway), so unless they specifically put something likeI give X to whoever is my spouse at the time of my death*, it surely has to refer to the time the will was made.

*Quite possibly the least romantic sentence ever written. Please don't put this in your will, folks.

Theknightwho (talk)04:10, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I seriously doubt a lawyer worth their salt would draft a will leaving a bequest to “my now wife” (or husband or spouse). The best practice is to explicitly name the beneficiary. —Sgconlaw (talk)10:59, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Is thisanapodoton lexicalised? (Comparewhen in Rome,if the shoe fits.)PUC –20:27, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

You've just createdthe early bird anda few bad apples. I'm not at all sure these are used alone as claimed.~2026-28366-2 (talk)20:48, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, I may have jumped the gun here, I found them atAppendix:English lexicalized anapodota. I'll delete them and add some more sections below.PUC –20:55, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hmm. Maybe:google books:"live by the sword and all that" turns up a fair few results. In contrast, I have not found similar widespread use of bare "sow the wind", nor "out of sight" except in the usual (already listed) meanings.- -sche(discuss)21:50, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Same question.PUC –20:46, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Same question.PUC –20:46, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Same question.PUC –21:01, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

This one has been indelibly lexicalized in the world of my mindever since this little gem got burned into my brain. Perhaps "lexicalized among the subpopulation known as 'best-of-Vine compilation watchers'" is its own subcategory of lexicalization lol.Quercus solaris (talk)22:36, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

These entries currently differ in whether the second vowel can be /ɪ/ or not. Is this correct as-is, or should /ɪ/ be added as a variant tohappen and/or removed as a possibility fromhappening?- -sche(discuss)21:23, 14 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Added as a variant tohappen I would say.BirchTainer (talk)19:54, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Atbishop#Derived terms there are four groups of derived terms, two now being of organisms, one containing onlyBishop and another labeled "church official, supervisor of priests and congregations; included in place names". AtBishop#Derived terms there is onlyBishopville.

I had always thought that the typical use case for derived terms was someone looking for a specific term, possibly to see whether it was blue-linked or red-linked. That would suggest that we should have a single table. Is that what most prefer?

If we were to divide up derived terms, on what basis would we do so? I think doing it by definition for polysemic terms is out of the question, excepting duplicating some as collocations where the appropriate definition is clear. We could consider doing it by part of speech of the derived terms. In this case Noun, Proper noun, Verb, Adjective, and Phrase would be required. We could try having distinct tables for different subject matter types: religious officials, African weaverbirds, plants, other organisms, toponyms, masturbation, chess, etc.DCDuring (talk)01:47, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Admittedly for most words it is moot because the derived-terms population is so small; but for the exceptions, such asbishop, here's my thinking so far: I certainly applaud themotive andeffort to group them (e.g., taxonomic names, church stuff, toponyms, and so on), and yet I also could easily live with WT forgoing all that and simply putting them all in one alphabetized list, from A to Z, without further sorting or filtering, because I respect that choice for a dictionary, versus a dictionario-cyclopedia (if you will). Other thoughts adjacent: (1) derived-from-bishop-qua-churchman and derived-from-Bishop-qua-surname (thus, derived-from-derivative) will explain some differences about placement, among the many list items (but accurate placement requires knowing the diachrony for each item rather than assuming it); and (2) here is just a general FYI for anyone who sees my choices about 'related'-versus-'derived' placement generally: I often err on the side of putting items under 'related' (instead of 'derived') when I don't know for a fact that 'derived' status, in the strictest sense, applies to the item. The thinking is that "'related' is known by me with certainty to be accurate even if 'derived' isn't known by me with certainty to be accurate" plus "someone can easily move each item later if/when they're certain about each one". Some people may feel that I am being too agnostically cautious about it, but they're free to move stuff from 'related' to 'derived' if they know the diachrony of the instance and they see the need.Quercus solaris (talk)04:24, 15 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

We have separate British and Australian senses: "(British) A dish of pieces of meat, fish, or vegetables roasted on a skewer or spit, especially a doner kebab." and "(Australia) A hand-held dish consisting of pieces of meat roasted on an upright skewer mixed with fresh vegetables and sauces and rolled up in a round piece of unleavened bread."

Are these really distinct? On googling, British and Australian kebabs seem to be essentially identical (meat from a skewer, vegetable salad, sauces, served in flatbread), except that in Britain they're normally served in the pocket of apita bread, rather than wrapped in it. I don't think that's a lexical difference, just a local cultural/culinary taste, and even that doesn't seem to be universal (one of the top hits for Australian kebab wasthis "anatomy of a good Australian kebab" showing it served in a sliced bread pocket, and one of the top hits for British kebab wasthis London kebab shop that wraps its kebabs).

Should we merge these senses, or is there something deeper I'm missing?Smurrayinchester (talk)08:57, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Staying on the topic of kebabs - we define this as "An increase in the prices of halal products and halal certification." Onlyone citation backs this up, and I'm pretty certain it's AI-generated: it quotesZohran Mamdani as saying "We need to leverage technology and collaborate across the industry to find sustainable solutions", which doesn't sound like something he'd ever say and isn't found anywhere else online, but is exactly the kind of thing AI says.

My understanding is that it's not actually about the price of halal food, but that of New York street food (particularly the kind commonly called "halal cart"). The actually verifiable citation, from the New York Times, has Mamdani talking about street food vendor permits, not halal certification. Should I change the definition?Smurrayinchester (talk)10:26, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

A blog[2] quotes a video I have not watched.

“New York is suffering from a crisis and it’s called halalflation,” Mamdani says, adding “Chicken over rice now costs $10 or more. It’s time to make halal eight bucks again.”

I see other media sources talking about the same video. The NYT quote currently third in the list is probably talking about the same video. As far as I can see that video is the entire corpus of uses rather than mentions ofhalalflation. If Mamdani is the only one talking about it, combined with people talking about him talking about it, the term won't meet criteria for inclusion. Others need to adopt the term.Vox Sciurorum (talk)22:22, 19 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

This seems spiritually akin toWT:BRAND (attestation "must be independent of any parties" associated with the brand and "must not identify any such parties"), in that every use of the word seems to refer to Mamdani's 2025 campaign. It appears in the February/March 2026 issue ofReason, again specifically referring to Mamdani and $8 food cart meals.Cnilep (talk)02:47, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

If we apply WT:BRAND to political coinages and expressions, we risk becoming mired in endless partisan battles.

There is no NYC permit relating specifically to halal certification. Halal compliance claimsmay be policed by NY State in a manner similar to kosher compliance. If you claim your food is kosher, you have to register with NYS and tell consumers who is certifying (rabbi, etc).

I believe that Mamdani is complaining about street vendor licensing. Rent-paying food providers complain bitterly about competition from cart- and truck-based food vendors. As street vendors get a lot of cash payments, there are plausible claims of sales-tax evasion as well.DCDuring (talk)17:55, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

I also don't think we should reinterpret or change BRAND. Nor do I see anything else in ATTEST that rules this out. And yet itfeels to me somehow contrary to thespirit of ATTEST. Similarly, if people only ever saidbazinga when talking about the character Sheldon fromThe Big Bang Theory, I wouldn't feel that it is acromulent English word. In this case, though, people usebazinga to refer to other things, and they may or may not be alluding to the TV program. It may be the case that people only usehalalflation when talking about the 2025 Mamdani mayoral campaign.Cnilep (talk)00:35, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

If all the citesrefer to the interview, then the cites are not independent. If the citesallude to the interview, then they may well be valid.DCDuring (talk)13:23, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Why, I'm repeating WHY, this word is only and ONLY in Japanese Wiktionary but not English? By the way, English speakers MUST (i said 'MUST' so) to know the meaning of the words outside of both JLPT and Wiktionary.Frozen Bok (talk)11:53, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Because entries are created by volunteers and no one has gotten around to adding that word yet.Horse Battery (talk)16:23, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I've added theJapanese現示 entry. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig}00:16, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Farafina, meaning '[an] African'.^[1]

Arlo Barnes (talk)17:03, 16 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

An IP editor added a note in the etymology for Persianآفرین, without the usual language linking template:

Also compare Avestan 𐬁𐬟𐬭𐬌𐬙𐬀, "greatly beloved".

Can anybody verify this?Vox Sciurorum (talk)20:10, 17 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I removed the note because I see no evidence that the word exists or that the editor has relevant expertise.Vox Sciurorum (talk)21:04, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Should we add a sense to this entry? As I am not personally connected to the region, I aim to approach the issue from a purely lexicographical perspective. Based on usage reflected in sources such as the English Wikipedia, Western Sahara is sometimes used as a synonym for theSADR. If this sense is considered acceptable, a possible concise definition could be:

A partially recognised state inNorth Africa , claiming the territory described above (sense #1). Capitals: (de jure)Laayoune; (de facto)Tifariti.

Usage labels such ascolloquial orinformal could be considered if appropriate. I would like to reiterate that I hold no political position on this matter; my intention is solely to discuss the feasibility of documenting this attested sense.Maraschino Cherry (talk)20:38, 17 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Certainly if we're mentioning that Morocco controls most of it, it makes sense to also mention who controls the rest. I don't know whether it's better to have separate senses for the territory and the SADR, or just cover things in one sense. I have tentatively, conservatively just expanded the existing sense, indiff.- -sche(discuss)02:56, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Good for now. I'm surprised to see there is a full entry here, sinceSADR links it to Wikipedia. But anyway, let's see how this Wikipedia entry goes: The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), also known as the Sahrawi Republic andWestern Sahara, is a partially recognized state... (omitted) If the above-mentioned usage is accepted by most Wiktionarians, we'd still better add a second sense, shan't we?Maraschino Cherry (talk)06:52, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Anyone heard of 'lachties' as short forlatchkey kids? Google Gemini has found 3 citations:

• Source:The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995)
• Date: August 2, 1983 (Page 3)
• Article Title: "Latchies" not just a city phenomenon
• Quote: > "The problem of'latchies' — children who go home to an empty house — is not confined to the cities."

• Source:The Bulletin (Volumes 109, Issues 5576-5584)
• Date: 1987
• Publisher: Australian Consolidated Press
• Quote: > "There are no figures on the number oflatchies in Australia, but several years ago one estimate put the figure at 150,000."

• Source:The Latchkey Kid (Novel)
• Author: Helen Townsend
• Date: 1990 (Page 48)
• Publisher: Masterpiece Books (Australia)
• Quote: > "What are we?Latchies, that's what we are. We've got our own keys and we let ourselves in and we make our own tea."

Sting Kipu (talk)11:30, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Plausible. Unfortunately I find no GBooks hits for "a latchy" or "a latchie" in this sense, so can't be too common.~2026-37962-4 (talk)14:02, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Indeed, I can't even find the "Latchies, that's what we are" cite (I did not look for the others), which raises the question of whether, as they so often do, the AI hallucinated it.- -sche(discuss)18:30, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Yep, there's no record of the existence of that book inthe WorldCat book database, so I'm going to assume that this is a hallucination.Smurrayinchester (talk)13:37, 19 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Volume 109 ofThe Bulletin also doesn't contain "latchies" (or "latchie" or even "latchkey").Smurrayinchester (talk)13:54, 19 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

• I wonder what the question/prompt to Gemini was. "Find three citations for the word latchies"?Find is sufficiently polysemic that "invent" is almost within our definitions. I tried "Are there three citations for the term "latchies" that meet the citation requirements of English Wiktionary?" It foundWT:CFI. and three possible definitions: a pronunciation spelling (or part thereof) ofkolaches; part of an occupational term in Indian English "dhobi/dhoby latchies"; and some vaguely specified name for inhabitants of a region. I asked it to provide a Wiktionary entry, which it did, with valid-looking citations. It asked whether I wanted the occupational term and provided one. It even asked whether I wanted a formatted entry and provided:

Clipping ofkolaches or a phonetic spelling representing a regional pronunciation ofkolache.

• IPA^(key):/ˈlætʃiz/

latchies (pluralTea rooms)

1. (regional,US,informal)Kolaches.
   • 1914 March 4, Sandi,The Daily Journal, International Falls, MN, page 4:

     We'll be serving the traditional prune and poppy seedlatchies at the bake sale this Saturday morning.

   • 2018 October 12, “Local Flavors”, inThe Ennis Daily News, Ennis, TX:

     Grandma always called themlatchies, and she didn't care if they were the sweet kind or the ones with Klobasnek.

   • 2024 September 18, Crossover Queen,Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos‎^[3]:

     My mom makes the sausage ones... and they say it more like ‘kah-latchies,’ probably via grandfather.

latchies (pluralTea rooms)

1. (India,dated) A class of menialhospitalworkers orattendants.
   • 1915,The Madras Municipal Manual, volume 2:

     The establishment for the Infectious Diseases Hospital shall consist of one sub-assistant surgeon, two ward boys, and fourlatchies...

   • 1962,The Indian Law Reports: Madras Series, page842:

     The petitioners, who are classified aslatchies in the Government General Hospital, seek a writ of mandamus...

   • 2016, “S. Nagasubramanian v. The Joint Registrar”, inMadras High Court‎^[4]:

     The services ofLatchies and DhobyLatchies (Category 58-Hospital Worker) were regularized under the special bylaws...

Category:English pluralsCategory:Indian EnglishCategory:American English

It could not handle the latest version of{{en-noun}} parameters. It invented{{quote-case}}, the only occurrence of which on Wiktionary was a red-link mention onmy talk page in 2020. I substituted{{quote-journal}}. It used "place" as a template parameter instead of "location".

I have not been able to find any of the citations for the Indian English term or the food term.

It seems surprisingly good at conforming to rules or making good guesses about likely ones. It may well have access to information that is not in the Google sources we customarily rely on.

I was able to get what seems like good information about the gender of taxonomic terms, for which it provided good references to the taxonomic codes and good efforts to find confirmation in taxonomic practice. It even acknowledged large-scale violation of the Code in the case of lepidopter literature of the 18th and 19th century. It was relatively easy to check the results to a high degree of certainty, but not absolute certainty.DCDuring (talk)18:45, 19 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

We appeared to have come to the consensus in the past that we use hyphens in entry titles even where the normal form has an en dash. (I didn't agree with this, but went along with it, e.g. when creating hundreds of "Smith-Jones theorem"-type entries.) LatelyUser:Sgconlaw has performed a move of WOTDmilitary–industrial complex to the dashed form:[5]. Can someone remind me, is there policy? Should it, can it be discussed again?~2026-37962-4 (talk)14:01, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Oh, I didn't realize there had been a discussion about this. I just followed the English Wikipedia article. Is there a policy? —Sgconlaw (talk)14:02, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Sgconlaw: SeeWiktionary:Style guide § En dashes.J3133 (talk)14:10, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@J3133: thanks. So no consensus. —Sgconlaw (talk)14:14, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

(But enough opposition, in prior discussions, that one should not be moving established pages that from hyphens to dashes, I'd say.)- -sche(discuss)18:33, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The hyphenated forms of these should be the lemma/headword forms, as is true in most any dictionary (many examples are of the "Surname-Surname syndrome" and "Surname-Surname disease" type, named after two physicians; also ones likeEpstein-Barr virus); if WT enters the en dash forms at all, then they should be the alt-form entries (using the{{alternative spelling of}} template).Quercus solaris (talk)00:04, 19 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

SeeTalk:差#Does Taiwanese Mandarin only use chā, and never chà?. If this is the case, I wonder if it's sensible to mark it as such within the pronunciation table, similar to how媽媽 and爸爸 use1nb= and2nb= within{{zh-pron}} to differentiate between standard (i.e.māma,bàba) and Taiwan variant (i.e.mǎmá,bǎbá) pronunciations. --benlisquare_T•C15:48, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

[Southwestern AmE noun and interjection]

"Utter nonsense" (informal mid-20th c. alteration of bullshit).JMGN (talk)19:16, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Are the second and third definitions actually different?JulieKahan (talk)09:33, 19 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I want to make add Turkish month abbreviations on Wiktionary, since they are used, for example, on the Turkish YouTube localization

But the thing is, month names are considered common nouns in Turkish, but are capitalized in dates. This leads me to a problem:

Should I keep them capitalized (Oca Şub Mar Nis May Haz Tem Ağu Eyl Eki Kas Ara) or make them lowercase for the entries (oca şub mar nis may haz tem ağu eyl eki kas ara)?

I know I posted this before in the general Information desk, but I figured that this is the right place to post it, so...Adamnewwikipedianaccount (talk)00:56, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I think they should be kept capitalizedZbutie3.14 (talk)13:16, 24 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Many old dictionaries define Frenchdiachalasie as separation of bones of the skull.δῐᾰ-(dĭă-) +χάλασις(khálasis). Can anybody find a genuine use, or even three, of this word?Vox Sciurorum (talk)01:17, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Here is an English translation, "diachalasis". We don't have this in English, either, but OED does, with 2 citations, unfortunately, marking it 'obsolete'. Even in the earliest, 1751 citation, it is introduced as: "Diachalasis, in the medicinal works of the antients [...]", so I don't have faith we will find any modern French uses of the word. If even back then it was already regarded as ancient and obsolete, then it should probably just be considered a dictionary-only ghost word. The only other sources on Google Books were all dictionary definitions – no uses.Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs)14:13, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

In 2024 an editor added the literal meaning "death to" to the definition of Persianمرگ بر(marg bar). Is that an appropriate definition? If so, should it be a separate sense using{{&lit}}?Vox Sciurorum (talk)15:41, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

in searching for the pronunciation of this term to verify the "Anglicised" transcription given, it appears that the termLlanelli is more commonly pronounced with the lateral fricative/ɬ/; the variants with the approximant/l/ or cluster/θl/ being rarer. it is not the case of code-switching between English and Welsh, as the vowel qualities are certaintly English, better exemplified withLlandovery andLlandudno.

the question is, should the pronunciation appendix (AP:ENPRON) be updated to include it as a marginal phoneme, similar to/x/ for Scottish English? Juwan  🕊️🌈20:55, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I don't know, if I were to resolve the pronunciations I hear on Youglish (at least some of which seem to be from Welsh English speaking lawmakers) to GA or RP phonemes, I would say I hear /hləˈnɛθli/ (approaching /klə-/ and/or /-ˈnɛθi/ for some speakers), or that but with the first vowel as /æ ~ a/; it does not sound to me like they are using the same ɬ sound that the audio files in e.g.Llandecwyn,Llandudno andw:Voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives have. (Nor does it sound like the first consonant is /θ-/; I might rfv-pron that one...)
(Regarding the vowel quality, Wikipedia gives the Welsh as [ɬaˈnɛɬi], which (given that UK //æ// is generally /a/, as discussed in various places here over the years) is the same vowels.)- -sche(discuss)20:49, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

With lawmakers, there's always the possibility of exaggerating the differences from standard English in order to show they identify with their constituents- who notably speak something thatisn't standard English. They may be Oxford-educated and normally sound like their collegues from other parts of the UK, but when the cameras are rolling...Chuck Entz (talk)22:31, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

As someone from the England-Wales border, I'd say I've heard /læn-/, /hlæn-/, /klæn-/ and even /xlæn-/ (I don't recall /θlæn-/, but it seems plausible), but I don't think I've ever heard /ɬæn-/ from anyone who wasn't a Welsh speaker, in which case I would consider it just something related to code-switching. I'm trying to work out what sound I'm hearing in theTransport for Wales station announcement (0:47 here).Smurrayinchester (talk)15:50, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Curiously, whether by chance or for a reason (is there a difference in the phonetic realization of of /ɬ/ in different regional varieties of Welsh, and does that correspond to where one vs another of these places are?), the pronunciations I can find on Youglish for different towns differ in how this consonant is realized. ForLlangollen,this guy pronounces the first consonant in a way that sounds like /l/ to me, something I didn't hear in the clips ofLlanelli.This guy has what sounds to me like /kl-/, but just like in theLlanelli examples, the second-ll- is /-θl-/: is there a difference in Welsh itself in how initial vs medialll is realized phonetically, that would explain why many Youglish speakers seem to produce different sounds for the initial vs the medial, or is that something that is only occurring in anglicization?- -sche(discuss)20:21, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

We don't need this in addition to the existing, I think, but he keeps re-adding it:[6].~2026-43519-2 (talk)22:18, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

That's not porn, it's high-class erotica. Besides, WT has thousands of unneeded porn quotes that WF put in already.Vealhurl (talk)22:50, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

OK, lol, it's crappy porn. Still a good cite tho!Vealhurl (talk)23:00, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Due to the xxx abuse filter I had to create these entries on the Talk pages. Please move them to the entry space if they look okay.~2026-43519-2 (talk)22:46, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Get an accountVealhurl (talk)22:48, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

 Done You should considercreating an account to avoid such hassle in the future.HyperAnd (talk)07:56, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

An article inLa Repubblica is headlined

Trump lancia il Board of Peace: sovranisti e autocrati in prima fila

This is supposed to be a criticism, kings and autocrats, but you wouldn't know it from Wiktionary. The definition of Italiansovranista here defines it assouverainist which is in turn defined as "A supporter of souverainism" with the last word defined as a "Alternative form of sovereignism" with the last word defined as

A doctrine which supports acquiring or preserving political independence of a nation or a region. It opposes federalism and approaches independentism movements.

The defence of the sovereignty of individual European countries in the face of broader European or European Union integration.

Obviously neither of those applies. So where did the chain of definitions go wrong? Did somebody mistakenly assume that cognates have identical meanings? Does the English word have another sense, likeroyalist? I don't use any of these words. I figure out their meanings from their roots and context when I see them.Vox Sciurorum (talk)01:34, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Are you certain that isn’t the right sense here? I’m not seeing a logical contradiction. (Autocratic towards their own citizens, souverainist towards the UN and such.)Nicodene (talk)19:43, 24 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Right. "Sovereign(t)ist" and "autocratic" seem like at best orthogonal — and at worst, aligned — characteristics. Perhaps our entry should be expanded a little; Wikipedia does a somewhat better job of conveying that the things "sovereigntists" want "sovereignty" from are only sometimes 'external' or 'higher-level' (e.g. supranational) entities like federations or the UN, sometimes they are e.g. internal marginalized or minority groups. (Think of white nationalists viewing the existence of other races in the same country as a threat to the existence, "future", or — one might say — sovereignty of white people, for example.)- -sche(discuss)20:34, 24 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Special:Contributions/~2026-46827-7 knowingly creating fake entries.~2026-49881-2 (talk)11:16, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

https://www.zdic.net/hant/%E9%90%96. Very useful to me. I'm not the best at editing, nor at reading Chinese, and my translator is iffy, but if you speak Chinese, do take a look at this! I was looking at a rare word and finally found the meaning. Now this is another, so if anyone is experienced, fill it in and please do fill some others in!AtTheTownHouse (talk)05:27, 24 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

How might regular descendants of Proto-Germanic*fraw(j)ô /*frawjǭ look in Middle and in modern English? I realize that there seems to have been a lot of conflation going on with other etymons in worlds like Old Englishfrēa /frēo as well as Old Norse Freya vs. Frigg and so on. Thanks (and apologies if this isn’t the right place to ask these sort of questions). Cheers _hugarheimur19:26, 24 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Yeah it'ssteelpipe all over again. But seriously, "creampie" (one word) is mostly pornography, and if you search for it (one word) in Google Books you find almost nothing. I suspect that the everyday food senses of "cream pie" (like a type of cookie) are probably NOT attestable perWT:CFI as "creampie".~2026-55146-8 (talk)00:48, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

If it's not clear what I'm asking: I think we should keep "cream pie" as the everyday standard term, and note that "creampie" is a fairly rare form used generally only in the pornographic sense. Thank you. Best wishes, Equinox's friend (Eq is a jerk, my job is hard).~2026-55146-8 (talk)00:58, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

We already have all the non-porn senses lemmatized atcream pie, and only the porn senses are atcreampie, no? And in books it seems like the porn senseis more often spelledcreampie (though my search was not exhaustive), so that seems fine...? I have added glosses to the reciprocal "altform" links the entries have. I guess we could label the "altform" sense oncreampie rare? BTW I think there is often a difference in stress (no?) which our entries don't explain very well yet.- -sche(discuss)19:51, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

• I'll do some research into the pronunciation ofcreampie in porn videos.Vealhurl (talk)12:34, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
  • Yep, both 1st- and 2nd-syllable stress are heard. /kɹiːm ˈpaɪ/ + /ˈkɹiːmˌpaɪ/Vealhurl (talk)13:33, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Is-genetic (e.g. incardiogenetic) meant to be the same in meaning as-genic (e.g.cardiogenic)? I'm wondering how to create the former and whether to treat it as an alternative form or whether to give it some different meaning, but I don't know whether they are the same exactly.Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs)14:03, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

IMHO,-genetic was once sometimes used a longer synonym for-genic.-genic seems to me to be more often used to mean "producing" that to which it is suffixed, rather than "produced by". Further, now genetics has partially captured-genetic so that it can be confusing to use it synonymously with-genic.DCDuring (talk)17:58, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Meanwhile, back at the ranch was a formulaic phrase used to announce transitions in on-screen text used in silent movie westerns and by narrators in TV serial westerns.

It is now sometimes used by those old enough to remember the original uses (dated?) to signal a change of topic or a return to the supposed main topic in a conversation. Does it seem entry-worthy? Is it used outside North America?

Meanwhile, back followed by a temporal or locative is a generalization that retains the allusion to the original uses. It would not stand without an entry formeanwhile, back at the ranch.DCDuring (talk)17:46, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The definitions have been subject to repeated changes, going (over the course of e.g.[7],[8]) from

1. (British,slang,derogatory,ethnicslur) Anydark-skinned person. It originally referred specifically to Indians, but later also applied to people of North African, Mediterranean, or Middle Eastern ancestry.
2. (Australia,slang,derogatory,ethnicslur) A person of Southern European, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, or Eastern European ancestry.

to

1. (British,slang,derogatory,ethnicslur) Any person who looks in-between "white" and "black": originally specifically anIndian, but later also broadened to anybody of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean descent.
2. (Australia,slang,derogatory,ethnicslur) Specifically someone of Mediterranean descent; the word does not really have an "Indian" connotation in Australia.

to

1. (British,ethnicslur) A non-white person. At first specifically an Indian, but later also broadened to people of Middle Eastern or African descent.
2. (Australia,ethnicslur) Specifically someone of Mediterranean descent, such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Lebanese, Greek, or Maltese.

So, who is a wog in Britain? Anyone dark-skinned? Or, as currently worded, anyone non-white, which would include people who are not dark-skinned, like many East Asians? Are Mediterranean people included or excluded?
And who is a wog in Australia? Only Mediterranean people, or also Middle Easterners and/or Southern/Eastern Europeans?- -sche(discuss)20:57, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

On a search in Google Books, the first hit wasthe memoir ofRod Liddle, who if nothing else is a man who knows a lot about racial terms. For his parents*,wog seems to have been a very broad term encompassing Indians, Arabs, Israelis/Jews (he doesn't go into whether they saw a difference, and if a white British Jew would also be so described) and Caribbean people, but not Chinese or Japanese. As a counterpoint to that, one joke that's almost always cut from reruns ofFawlty Towers is a joke about confusing Indians and West Indians, and the correct ethnic slur for each, and the "wily oriental gentleman" folk etymology suggests most people understand it primarily referring to Asians of some description. I suspect there's also confusion/crossover betweenwog (which I would understand as a racist slur against an Indian or Arab, per theFawlty Towers joke and the few times I've heard it IRL) andgollywog (a slur against a black person). Maybe there are two senses, one as a targeted slur against brown people from West and South Asia, and one as a general slur for all non-whites or even all foreigners.

* I also think this needs a "dated" tag. I don't think I've ever heard it from someone my age, and even inFawlty Towers, the joke is delivered by an elderly, semi-demented old colonel.Smurrayinchester (talk)11:21, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

(I also just checkedOFCOM'soffensive language reference guide, and I was surprised to see that they seem to consider it primarily a slur against black people.)Smurrayinchester (talk)11:37, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Native AusEng speaker here. I'm a responsible, working adult now, but back in my highschooler days, I would only call another classmate a wog if they were Italian, Greek, Croat, Lebanese, or Coptic Egyptian. We did not call Poles wogs, however. Note that this personal anecdote is subject to the fact that I grew up in a predominantly Catholic neighbourhood with literally zero Serbs or Bosniaks, but I assume I probably would have called those wogs too if I grew up in a different area. Hope this helps. --benlisquare_T•C14:27, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The phrasewogs begin at Calais (France's nearest point to England) was apparently used in a 1949 novel, though EtymOnine dates it to 1971. i think this uses the same type of exaggeration we hear when people from the American South call anyone to their north a Yankee, and therefore it isnt a cite for "anyone south of Britain" butrather an additional cite in favor of the Mediterranean or "in between white anfd black" sense.—Soap—14:24, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Is it just me, or does the pronadded here have way too many apostrophes???Vealhurl (talk)21:02, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

• RevertedVealhurl (talk)12:35, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

The Finnish term «puitteissa» (i.e. «pukeissa») has an admittedly false etymology "puit- +‎-e, as if from verbpuittaa, frompuu." «Puittaa», properly spelled «puettaa» is to dress or put clothes on, not to work with wood.

The men who discuss such abstract "frameworks" or "settings" are not woodworkers, but they are wearing nice clothes and holding formal business meetings when they use buzzwords like that. The word «puitteissa» is actually a variant of «pukeissa», just as «puettaa» is a variant of «pukea».

Such men are well dressed,«puetettu» in Finnish, and «puitteet» or «pukeet» («vaatteet») are the clothes they are wearing, not the wooden table or the chairs where they are sitting, and certainly not the wooden studs in the wall.Justina Colmena ~biz (talk)22:33, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

EDIT: It's a business-suit "framework" of something and it's incredibly obnoxious and ingratiating business-speak.Justina Colmena ~biz (talk)22:41, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I have no idea what you are talking about. The definition and etymology thatpuitteissa currently has is correct, yours looks completely made up (not the first time). —SURJECTION^{/ T/ C/ L/}05:21, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I explained. I do realize it's a "post position" fixed expression of sorts meaning "in the frameworks of" but those are merely "business-suit frameworks" for discussion purposes only, referring to «pukeita», not «puita».Justina Colmena ~biz (talk)07:19, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

No, that is complete nonsense. There is no such noun as*puete, nor is a form like*puetteissa used anywhere. Unless you have any source for such a word, I cannot assume anything else than that you simply made this up. —SURJECTION^{/ T/ C/ L/}17:56, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

What part of speech islikely in cases such as:

• "You'll try it some day, likely enough, but you won't enjoy it."
• "If I am busy, well, likely as not we go anyway."

?- -sche(discuss)18:28, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Adverb; a sentence(clause) adverb.likely as not seems like a common or garden variety of elision of an expression like "as likely as not likely", ie, "even money". Comparable tomore likely than not (likely). I could imagine it being an adjective in the same expressions. "A likely enough story." "Rain is likely as not today".DCDuring (talk)18:47, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. the reason I'm asking is that we currently have the same kinds of sentences, withlike(“likely”), listed as a particle instead: sense 1 oflike#Particle. We should move that definition into the adverb section, yes?- -sche(discuss)19:09, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I have moved the sense in question to the adverb section.- -sche(discuss)23:53, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I was thinking thatlike is sometimes (colloquially, very informally) used instead oflikely.Like enough seems to my ear a little less acceptable thanlike as not, but I'm sure I've heard both. Theymight be are attestable, but I'm not sure whether the MWEs are entry-worthy, though they would probably be hard to parse for some English learners, who might be looking at the syntax in detail.DCDuring (talk)14:18, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Should the mainadjective entry fornudy be atnudie ? Seems wrong.Leasnam (talk)00:58, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Seems resolvable at Google NGrams.DCDuring (talk)14:27, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I'm don't think it's that simple.Nudie is also the spelling for the noun, and it's also a name "Nudie", which interferes with the result. And, there's the attributive noun sense as innudie beach ("nudist beach"), which is different to the adjective use as innudy picture ("naked picture"). Properly,nudy/nudey should be the adjective (formed fromnude + adjectival-y) andnudie/nudey/nudy should be the noun (formed fromnude + diminutive-ie/y).Leasnam (talk)14:45, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

What makes you so sure thatnudie is a true adjective? Attestablity ofnudier andnudiest? Use after a copula, and with what definition?Nudie in anudie picture,nudie show, etc. seems to be attributive use of the noun in the sense "Entertainment involving naked people, especially women."DCDuring (talk)15:55, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Perhapsnudy picture wasn't the best example; yet there are several examples ofso nudey,very nudey, etc. sonudy/nudey *is* an adjective.Leasnam (talk)17:12, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

What makes you so sure that nudie is a true adjective? Attestablity of nudier and nudiest? - that's just what I'm saying...I believe the adjective is actuallynudy/nudey;nudier &nudiest would then be forms ofnudy.Leasnam (talk)17:15, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

For the noun using NGrams of "a nudie" and "the nudie" vs. the others,nudie is much more common.Nudie andnudey ornudy may not be interchangeable.DCDuring (talk)21:05, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

No NGrams evidence as to relative frequency of the putative adjective asso andvery don't appear there preceding any of the three spellings.DCDuring (talk)21:33, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Simply counting the number of Google Books pages for "the nudie" vs. "the nudey" gives a relative frequency advantage of about 15 to 3 fornudie. No more than 20% of thenudie hits are for capitalizedNudie. More OneLook dictionaries have entries fornudie than for other spellings. Actually, discounting Urban Dictionary, only Green's hasnudey as being an alt. form ofnudie. Only enwikt and UD havenudy. Green's has the most citations. all associated with definitions. None of their definitions related tonudist ornudism. Green's had but one definition that was not covered by the "entertainment" definition we have: "a nude performer", which isn't the same as anudist.DCDuring (talk)21:33, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

i can look for more cites. the cite i have undernudey is from a campfire song where one can easily find all three spellings. i think i picked-ey because it was the barest^(LOL!!!!) of the three entries. I'm not sure all three spellings would pass CFI individually as an adjective, however.—Soap—14:12, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

i guess i have one more thing to say .... my question from another thread about whethersleep naked usesnaked as an adjective (my position) or as an adverb is still unanswered, i believe. that would affect how the cites i find would count. after all, the campfire song is specificallyswim nudey nudey nudey ... to me that's an adjective because it describes the person, not the swimming, but if we count it as an adverbial use then we may not be able to cite it as an adjective.—Soap—15:06, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Soap, I would saynaked in the example above ("sleep naked") is an adjective, in the same way one cansleep full orsleep hungry orsleep satisfied orsleep tight - it modifies the condition of theperson sleeping, not the manner in which the sleeping is performed.Leasnam (talk)19:31, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

although NGrams allows searching by part of speech, I'm not sure how accurate it is, and a few days ago while doing a search I actually got a negative result, so I'm not too confident in the extended functionality of NGrams. I think all we need is three cites for each spelling and a vague estimate of which is the most common.—Soap—15:04, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Campfire songs are folk poetry. I don't think poetry of any sort can be relied on. Others may disagree.

Many linguists don't bother with adjective-adverb distinctions, especially in such cases, treating them as adjuncts. We can't do that in our PoS headings, but we might be able to finesse the matter in parsing citations.

Patrick Hanks, lexicographer (Collins COBUILD) and corpus researcher, estimated an error rate of 12% (IIRC) for such tagging at the professionally tagged corpora, so one should not rely on PoS-frequency results for uncommon spellings. I don't know how Google compares.DCDuring (talk)17:59, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

What part(s) of speech is this? See entry for written and spoken examples. Based on the uses withbe or without a verb, I was about to enter it as an adjective, but it's hard to view uses withhave as adjective. (Do we set up "one foot out the door" as an adjective and "have one foot out the door" as a separate verb? That feels duplicative.)
Depending on what we decide, we will need to modify or supplement "have one foot in the grave" too, because "one foot in the grave" also occurs withbe or as a verbless modifier. ("A person becomes an in-betweener after having a close brush with death, a one-foot-in-the-grave kind of close [brush]." "That was one-foot-in-the-grave old in 1971.")- -sche(discuss)07:22, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Prepositional phraseVealhurl (talk)10:50, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Impossible, as a PP has a preposition as its grammaticalhead.~2026-76191-8 (talk)20:52, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Noun phrases, used usually as object of verb (have, be, put?, get?) [and preposition (with)], and, very rarely, attributively. They are both expressions that are rarely used outside the most common collocations (withhave andbe). Perhaps there are other structures in which they are creatively used.DCDuring (talk)14:32, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I must agree here. In fact, I ask myself what's the difference,syntactically, between havingone foot out the door and having ahand in the cookie jar or seeing asnake in the grass. It's food for thought at least. To be pondered more later.Quercus solaris (talk)18:47, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Or being a snake in the grass.DCDuring (talk)20:38, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Slovene.

Is this audio correct? To me, it seems to start withIPA^(key):/t/.

Its uploader (User:LamereTot; seecommons:Special:Contributions/LamereTot) seems to be responsible for the creation of various audios with many different language prefixes:Hr- (Croatian),Fo- (Faroese),Sl- (Slovene),En- (English),EnAU-/En-au- (Australian English),En-us- (American English),Pt-br- (Brazilian Portuguese),Fr- (French),Et- (Estonian),Nl- (Dutch),Cs- (Czech),Ga- (Irish),Es- (Spanish)

Those audio are used in various pages across wikis.

A user in 2016 apparently told them to "use language code prefixes" in their uploads,commons:User talk:LamereTot#Pronunciation file names, and they have been doing that...

Do note that, in some cases, their uploads are not for new files: they replace earlier more plausible pronunciations.

An earlier version of this audio washttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/8/84/20120808183437%21Sl-Ljubljana.ogg

Also here is a YouTube video in Slovene with a person saying "Ljubljana" in the first few secondsDinotti na Tv Ljubljana (Intervju)..Emanuele6 (talk)02:10, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

We seem to attract people who record bad (sometimes non-native) audio, in lots of languages. The circumstantial evidence (of the person recording audio in such a wide range of languages) suggests that may be what's happened here, too. Pinging two Slovene speakers, @Ashucky,Marjan Tomki SI, can you listen to the current audio atLjubljana#Slovene and then the earlier versions (find and play them under "File history" here) and let us know which of them (if any) sound right?- -sche(discuss)06:49, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I have listened to sound in different section in the current article

• Ljubljana#English: south England: understandable, as some non-native would pronounce it. Intonation through the word rises in the middle, which sounds a bit like as a native would use in a question, e.g.:Do you live in Ljubljana? Only, if that were the case the last a would be also in higher pitch, with this audio the pitch lowers there.
• (Can weverify⁽⁺⁾ this pronunciation?) (particularly: dubious audio) Audio:
  • This is a bit fast spoken (short), otherwise absolutely correct, spoken by a native speaker. If I were speaking to a nonnative (or somebody hard of hearing or at a noisy place), I would speak more slowly, but otherwise this is correct as pronounced, regarding stresses, and melody (pitch).
• Ljubljana#French: Audio (France (Vosges))
  • Spoken as a foreigner, understandable, wowels and consonants correct. Stress in on the first syllable, should be on on second, melody (pitch) OK.
• Ljubljana#German: Audio (Germany (Berlin))
  • Pronunciation correct (wowels, consontants, stress, melody), but slow and exaggerated (a foreigner who speaks from the book where pronunciation is written correctly, but did not yet hear a native speak it).

I grew in a big family with a lot of linguists (and had some training both about that and music during my education 50+ years ago. Then I could also speak (or at least sing songs in) several dialects of Slovenian:

• Ljubljanski,
• Koroški (Rateče, Beljak (Willach), Bistrica v Rožu (Feistritz in Rosenthall))
• Gorenjski (Zabreznica, Bohinj),
• Ribniški (Ribnica) (characteristic, but don't know what group it belongs to, Dolenjski or Notranjski)
• Štajerski (Velenje, maybe Maribor, maybe Polskava)
• Trentarski (Log v Trenti, Bovec, Kobarid)
• could (and still can) sing some Prekmurske and Belokranjske songs.

Now I can still recognize several of those and some others, but can no more chose which dialect I'll speak. I can only recall and reproduce some characteristic sentences in some of those dialects.

I didn't translate names or regional (groups of) dialects, but you can probably get the idea about lot of different (correct) pronunciations. Most are mutually easily understandable, some not so easily. I'ts like Friulano, Napoletano, Calabrese etc. in Italy, which probably differ from standard Italian almost as Rumanian, or Catalan in Spain.

I used linguistic skills with informatics, but I'm not up to date with a lot of things discussing natural spoken (or sung) languages, and I have tu guess a lot, and am not (yet) familiar with reading, less writing IPA notation of pronunciation. Until I learn more (if I find myself able) a description as above is probably the best I can do at the moment. Also, the device I'm using has no microphone, so I can't record audio.

I can listen and tell what I hear, and if it sounds as particular dialect or foreigner, but not much more.Marjan Tomki SI (talk)22:30, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

[Edit conflict] @Marjan Tomki SI Thank you for the response! I got suspicious of that audio because to me it seemed to start with a /t/ sound, while the pronunciation I heard in the YouTube video I linked was closer to the one I expected based on the transcriptionIPA^(key):/ˌʎuˈbʎaːna/, also other voice clips I was able to find, but if you say it sounds correct to you, I believe you!

Incidentally, question for the editors of Slovene entries, I've just noticed thatAP:pron:sl doesn't even mention aIPA^(key):ʎ phoneme, isn't it supposed to be represented asIPA^(key):/lj/ perhaps?Emanuele6 (talk)22:58, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

I hear the phon intended but it is surely forced inasmuch as bloke learned to force this sound from the alveolar plosive and alveolar lateral approximant. The stressed vowel is also inauthentic, you might argue the length is missed.Fay Freak (talk)13:17, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Just noting that it's generally against Commons policy to upload a new file which overwrites an existing file (unless, I would argue, the existing file is clearly faulty in some way—for example, it cannot be played due to a technical error, or the pronunciation is obviously wrong). —Sgconlaw (talk)19:58, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Is it really pronounced/ilaːs/? changing it from /j/ to /i/ was thesole edit of an IP. If it's /i/, do we know if it's stressed on that /i/? Thanks,—Soap—14:02, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I trust Kolmiel more than a random one-edit IP and have undone the change. Comparejlööve.- -sche(discuss)06:37, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

It's phonemically/jlaːs/, phonetically[ʝlaːs]. The above-mentioned user actually refers to these onsets on their Central Franconian phonology page. I can say that it may also become[ɟlaːs ~ ɡlaːs] or[jə̆ˈlaːs]; but *[iˈlaːs] is entirely ruled out.~2026-61189-1 (talk)19:17, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Do you think we should have more of these?I just searched a bit how to translatebehavioral inertia,psychological inertia,cognitive inertia,emotional inertia idiomatically. It is closely related torepresentativeness bias,anchoring effect andpath dependence, that's what I note because I am a word aficionado. We already havebureaucratic inertia. Certainlyinstitutional inertia isn't idiomatic? They talk aboutthe types of inertia in human sciences (→DOI =Wikipedia Library).

Our definition ofinertia provides only rudimentary coverage of the concepts therebehind – based on Webster 1913, who would have failed to guess this? I hypothesize that they didn't have this meaning range them times there. Or how do we describe this grammar if examples are understood asSOP? @Box16,Imetsia,Ioaxxere.Fay Freak (talk)15:57, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Fay Freak: In my opinion, if the definition of "X inertia" is basically "the tendency of X to resist change", then it's SOP. Even forbureaucratic inertia the entry-worthiness is a little dubious but maybe you could say that it's an idiomatic expression.Ioaxxere (talk)19:50, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

I find it wrong then that Wiktionary definesinertia as firstly the property of a body in physics, which is true but exposes to us the materialism or naturalism of the nineteenth century if we extend it to any application in human behaviour, which is guided by various respects driving it or restraining it. It has little to do with unwillingness, which is our second definition, when we comprehend willing as a resolution while inertia is incapacity, to act in time, owing to systematic hindrances. (Laziness Does Not Exist.) Then again we have a very specific gynecological definition from medicine, so that we do as if psychological distinctions did not exist.Fay Freak (talk)20:37, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

These might be SoP if we had the appropriate definition. Most of these expressions and maybe others would make good collocations at [[inertia]] at that missing definition, something like MWOnline's "indisposition to motion, exertion, or change". The grammar is boring: [ADJ + NOUN]. The way the adjective modifiesinertia to create a meaning like "indisposition to change in the cognitive realm" is fairly typical. Whether our definitions of the various adjectives are substitutable in the expressions to yield meanings is a separate question, quite possibly answered in the negative.

I think that the physics sense has arguably captured the term in the minds of most of those who use the term, reducing any earlier and etymologically prior sense to a mere figurative extension.DCDuring (talk)21:12, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Ages ago, Turkishgayzer was given pronunciation [ɟajzeɾ]. Is ɟ correct or should it be ɡ as implied by the spelling? A century ago the first vowel was e. The front allophone of g could be correct.Vox Sciurorum (talk)16:39, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

This showed up inWiktionary:Todo/Lists/Derivation category does not match entry language under the headingIn "Lower Tanana terms derived from X" but not in "Lower Tanana lemmas" or "Lower Tanana non-lemma forms". That's because the only part of speech is "directional", which isn't recognized inWT:EL as a valid POS header. I changed it to "particle", which is the Wiktionary POS equivalent of "???", then changed my mind and made it a suffix.

Like many agglutinative languages, this language has morphemes for just about anything you could imagine- and a number that you couldn't in your wildest dreams... I suspect this is something prosaic like an affix, a preposition or an adverb, but it takes a number of other morphemes to inflect in various ways. I would contend that the fact that it takes its own set of affixes doesn't preclude it from being one itself. It apparently goes after the main root, so it should be considered a suffix.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't also label it as a directional:{{head}} can take any number of numbered category parameters (|cat2=,|cat3=, etc.), so|cat2=directionals will put it in the correct category.

Does anyone have any better ideas? @Vergencescattered, who's been using this POS.Chuck Entz (talk)23:31, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

"Directional" is a specific part of speech term used in several Athabaskan languages, so I do think it should be the head of speech for these entries. The term refers to "words that specify direction with regard to a frame of reference, such as a body of water" (Leer 1989, quoted in Vajda 2022). They're basically halfway between adverbs and postpositions.

In the Lower Tanana Dene Dictionary (LTDD), for example, Kari lists the parts of speech in Lower Tanana (excluding verbs) as "nouns, adverbs, and postpositions, and minor word categories such as adjectives, pronouns, directionals, numerals, and exclamations." (p. 631) While I suppose "minor word categories" could be interpreted to mean that directionals aren't a part of speech, they are explicitly placed on the same level as pronouns, adjectives, etc., which definitely are parts of speech. Additionally, in dictionary entries, when parts of speech are given,(dir.) is given for directionals, in contrast with(n.), (adj.), (v.pf.) [verbal prefix], and so on. Kari doesn't give a great explanation for directionals in the LTDD, but he gives a better one in his Ahtna dictionary, and the system is very similar. Basically, all directional words are made of a prefix + a "directional root" + a suffix. The root + suffix is the "directional." I don't think "root," "adverb," "particle," or "suffix," really capture the structure properly, so "directional" seems to be the most convenient way to handle it. I'm also just generally uncomfortable with changing parts of speech listed in academic sources, even if it seems strange to me.

I'll also note that Vajda (2022) uses the term to refer to directionals in the Yeniseian languages, and refers to them as a part of speech, but as that is an attempt to establish a genetic connection between Yeniseian and Na-Dene, it doesn't necessarily mean much about the term's general use. (Fortescue 2022, in the same bookMid-Holocene Language Connections between Asia and North America, also refers to "directionals," but only briefly, and I don't know that it's intended to refer to a part of speech.)

I would be interested if anyone knows if the same term is used for words like Hawaiianmauka,makai, which from what I understand are used similarly to the northern Athabaskan system, except with the ocean as a frame of reference instead of rivers.Vergencescattered (talk)00:06, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Is Translingual a language? Because it's many languages, sometimes even all languages, can it still be considered a language in itself?Oh, It's Me! So Cool! (talk)01:40, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

It's a restricted-entry wastebasket. Taxonomic names is a "language" with Proper nouns and some postpositive modifiers, governed by simple morphological rules affecting certain names. CJKV characters are used across 4 languages, not necessarily with the same meaning. Some other characters, and abbreviations and symbols are used across languages. I don't see much beyond "translinguality" itself that unifies them.DCDuring (talk)03:18, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

There's an aspect to it thattranslinguality comprises terms that not only are cognate across languages but moreover have identical character strings and invariant morphology. Thus, for example, if I tell you thatf = ma or thatE = mc² or that2HCl + 2Na → 2NaCl + H₂, you can't tell which language I'm writing from within the reading frame of the italicized portion, because the differences between the written languages collapse to zero within that context. But I don't pretend to be a professional linguist who can defend the theoretical edifice of it. I'm just pointing out a practical aspect of it.Quercus solaris (talk)20:18, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

傷 (siuⁿ) means ‘too; excessively’ in Southern Min; the same for Fenhe region of Central Plains Mandarin. SeeGreat Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects,Page 4887:

煮的時候傷長啦／煮的时候伤长啦[Central Plains Mandarin]  ― zhǔ de shíhòu shāng cháng la[Pinyin]  ―  boiled fortoo long

I wonder whether this exists elsewhere.物灵 (talk)09:13, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Sorry if I'm using this template wrong, I just noticed this wrong audio file. English/Montevideo General American pronunciation has wrong audio file ("congratolatory").— Thisunsigned comment was added by~2026-73883-9 (talk) at19:14, 2 February 2026 (UTC).Reply

• FixedVealhurl (talk)21:29, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

CertainlyDaoism can be pronounced with /d/, but various dictionaries sayTaoism too can be pronounced with /d/:Merriam-Webster lists /d-/ first (and /t-/ second), for the spelling withT-, and separately specifies how the spelling withD- is pronounced — so they're not just carelessly lumping the two words' data together, they're specifically saying the spellingT- can be pronounced with /d/. The OED too mentions both /t/ and /d/ as pronunciations ofTaoism. Does this seem correct, does it jive with how you've heard this spelling pronounced? (I noticed this due to[9]. /d/ was removed as an option indiff.)- -sche(discuss)07:52, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I feel that the accepted variability is correct, as it is influenced by theWade-Giles–versus–Pinyin difference. So it is like the fact thatMao Tse-tung can be pronounced homophonously withMao Zedong.Quercus solaris (talk)16:50, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I've heard this. I think a lot of people will hear a pronunciation and see a spelling and just put it down to the exoticness of foreign languages. We could perhaps make a case that when people say /daʊ/ they should writeDao, and that thereforeTao is an incorrect spelling of /daʊ/, rather than /daʊ/ being an incorrect pronunciation ofTao. I'm not sure such a distinction really matters, .... the question remains, though, whether we should consider this standard or nonstandard, and I don't have a strong opinion on that.—Soap—23:30, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

if we keep both i should at least say that i think the /t/ pronunciation should come first.—Soap—16:06, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. Keep both, and put T first. The D version shouldn't be labeled nonstandard because the only people who think it's "wrong" are those who misapprehend because they don't adequately understand the transliteration nuance regarding theWade-Giles–versus–Pinyin difference. They think they're enforcing a "rule" that the letter T inherently cannot stand for any sound except /t/. But that's just a misapprehension, which they can understand and properly appreciate once it is pointed out to them (with examples) that T is often /t/, /d/, /ɾ/, /ʃ/, /ʔ/, or silent.Quercus solaris (talk)17:04, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

although you say you agree with me you go on to say something i disagree with. however, i may be wrong. let me expand on my earlier post ....

i think the pronunciation should determine the spelling. anyone using voiced stops in Mandarin words is using the Pinyin recommended pronunciations, and therefore should use the Pinyin spellings, which here would beDao. i realize, though, that a basic assumption i've never questioned before is that just as Pinyin recommends voiced stops for this series, the Wade-Giles transcription system recommends voiceless ones. i can't find an explicit pronunciation list for Wade-Giles, though. all i can say is that it's a very strong tendency. I've never heardMao Tse-tung with voiced stops, for example. I'm sure that we could find people using Wade-Giles spelling with Pinyin pronunciation in informal contexts, but such contexts are very prone to hyperforeignisms, of which I could find many other examples.—Soap—17:21, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Except actual voicing isn't involved: the UK and US standard varieties of English represent "voicing" of many stops with aspiration: /t/ is aspirated [tʰ] and /d/ is unaspirated [t]. Mandarin Chinese also has an opposition of aspirated vs. unaspirated stops. Many other European languages (mostly non-Germanic) don't use aspiration, but have actual voicing: /t/ is [t] and /d/ is [d].

Early romanization systems for Mandarin were influenced by the other European languages and have t for unaspirated and t' for aspirated, but Mandarin pinyin follows English and has t for aspirated [tʰ] and d for unaspirated [t].

English speakers who don't know Chinese tend to see the Wade-Giles t and mispronounce it as [tʰ] (Wade-Giles t'), but others pronounce it correcty as [t]. Both pronunciations have become established, though [tʰ] may be proscribed to some extent.

The problem is that the vast majority of English speakers know nothing about Mandarin Chinese pronunciation, so even very knowledgeable people don't base their pronunciation on it.Chuck Entz (talk)19:22, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hmm. OK. I would have interpreted spoken /d/ as a speaker usingdaoism and spoken /t/ as a speaker usingtaoism, but I'm fine with listing both pronunciations for both spellings. (Chuck, perhaps I have misunderstood what you are saying, but in my experience of both speech and linguistic literature, Englishinitial /d-/ is normally voiced...?) I think pronunciations of pinyind,b, etc as /d/, /b/, etc are spelling pronunciations, not attempts to reproduce any feature or distinction of spoken Chinese, because I note that even languages like Hindi whichhave phonemic /p/, /pʰ/, and /b/ andcould reproduce the /p/-vs-/pʰ/ distinction Chinese makes, don't: even Hindiबीजिंग, "Borrowed from Chinese 北京 (Běijīng)", uses /b/.- -sche(discuss)18:43, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

@-sche: whether the initial /d/ is phonetically voiced is irrelevant, since aspiration is used by native speakers to determine "voicing". If I go to the audio file atstout and start from right after the "s", I hear "doubt". There are, of course, English consonants with a voiced vs. voiceless distinction (e.g. /z/ vs. /s/), but those aren't oral stops. I believe that the pinyin "d" was most likely originally based on what English speakers would hear, since English is the largest Latin-script language with the same aspiration-based distinction on the stop series.

As for "spelling pronunciation", "English speakers who don't know Chinese tend to see the Wade-Giles t and mispronounce it as [tʰ]" seems like a pretty straightforward description of a spelling pronunciation. I didn't saywhy others pronunced the sound correctly- they just weren't using the English-based spelling pronunciation I described. At any rate, I was just trying to explain how thetao vs.dao spellings got started. More recently, the presence of both spellings has led to people using spelling pronunciations and people just repeating what they either hear or see specified in reference works.Chuck Entz (talk)19:41, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Of the 2,028 members of the category, 1,428 do not contain the word 'pronunciation'. The pronunciation is not obvious for many of these. One syllable or two? Some have pronunciations that are acronymic for synonymous terms. Others are mixes of acronyms and initialisms.

1. If we are going to build categories for some abbreviations based on pronunciations, don't we have some obligation to actually ascertain the pronunciations that justify category membership?
   1. Where will we get the evidence for a specific pronunciation?
   2. If we can't get evidence on a specific pronunciation and one possibility is that it is pronounced as an initialism, how should it be categorized? Bump them up the tree toCategory:English shortenings? Or acknowledge our ignorance by having "not elsewhere categorized" at the many points in our category trees where our ignorance is manifest?
2. Should items that seem likely to have mixed acronym and initialism pronunciation be in both categories or in a new category. (We already haveCategory:English syllabic abbreviations as a subcategory ofCategory:English acronyms, which seems based on a similar sort of differentiation.)

I would not be surprised that items inCategory:English initialisms had similar issues.DCDuring (talk)21:23, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

I commend the aspirations behind each of these questions. Regarding evidence, my immediate thought is that because thoroughly evidence-based assertions are going to be difficult to achieve widely (for many thousands of terms), there's going to be a durable dearth. (But heck, all of Wiktionary, and even all of dictionarydom, is not more than "the best we've got so far".) For the ones that people haggle over (e.g.,nuh-uh!who sez?!), the wiki processby nature willadduce evidence for those ones first. (Lol,they say that if you want good answers from Reddit, just post a wrong answer that seems like it was earnest and then sit back and watch it reel in a better answer byadduction as people scratch the itch of annoyance by correcting it). As for anecdotal evidence (e.g., attested utterances in videos, or Dictionary-XYZ-sez-so) versus nonanecdotal evidence (linguistic research datasets), I doubt that we can even get the latter without original research. Regarding categorization, I am of the camp that says that a user should encounter the term via either avenue (either category) because neither answer is false. For example,HVAC is both an initialism and an acronym (in most senses of those terms, even the narrow ones) because /ˈeɪt͡ʃˌvæk/ and /ˌeɪt͡ʃ.vi.eɪˈsi/ are both common. Extant dualities are true even when categorization schemes wish they weren't; and good categorization schemes have methods for acknowledging them (instead of trying to deny them).Quercus solaris (talk)

What about the initialism-acronym mixes that have evidence of such pronunciation? Do we need a new category? I'm guessing that we have ~20-50 of them, but most (all?) without any pronunciation info.DCDuring (talk)00:27, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

I think it would be OK to have both "[Category:English initialisms]" and "[Category:English acronyms]" on the same page, or (for autocat) "{init of|en|foo} or {acronym of|en|foo}" at the def line, and then show both prons at the pron section. I agree that achieving pron info for the missing ones is a goal. I'm asking myself examples off the top of my head.HVAC andSQL are the ones I thought of first.Quercus solaris (talk)00:32, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Talk:51 percent shows that this was deleted at RFD, so how come it exists now?~2026-76191-8 (talk)21:51, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply