A place to ask for help on finding quotations, etymologies, 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 the Grease pit. For questions about specific content, you're in the right place.
Latest comment:1 month ago4 comments3 people in discussion
This was just created as a protologism, but there are a good number of hits both in Google Books and Google web search. Figuring out what it means is another matter. Apparently people are using it randomly to refer to anything claimed to be "magical" involving just about every possible sense offocus, mostly to make whatever it is sound original and clever, and rarely used to refer to the same thing twice (unless it's a brand name). I don't know whether to rfv this- the definition in the entry doesn't seem to exist- or what to do with it.Chuck Entz (talk)00:56, 1 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Boy. Chuck. It's on Urban Dictionary, and at the time of this typing, September 1 2025 UTC-4, it's the first thing that pops up on the website. I didn't coin it. An Urban Dictionary user did. Here's thelink to the profile. It's in blue text.Legendary winner73 (talk)06:50, 1 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, like made-up modern slang and NSFW stuff. If a kid trusts Urban Dictionary, he/she will need to find a synonym for the word "jump". So yes, some tosh, but still...! Some random word coined back in 2009, and now it's in Wiktionary!Legendary winner73 (talk)07:13, 1 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago5 comments4 people in discussion
I would have thought the main American pronunciations were /tɛmˈpɛs.tʃu.əs/, /-tju-/. The two pronunciations we list instead, /tɛmˈpɛst͡ʃə.wəs/ and /tɛmˈpɛs.t͡ʃəs/, sound odd to me. The one with /w/ seems to some extent to be taking thehere-disused approach of viewing /V.V/ as having a /j/ or /w/, but it also asserts the penultimate vowel is a schwa, which I also question, though I see MWO asserts it.- -sche(discuss)07:02, 1 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Recent edits removing and reverting and restoring thevulgar label from the 'manipulate with the tongue' sense made me realize we are combining quite a lot into one sense. Merriam-Webster's corresponding sense even encompasses cowstonguing grass, which is clearly not vulgar ... but my initial impression is that we may be dealing with, if not separate senses, at least subsenses, because "the cows tongued the grass" and "he caught me tonguing her" seem ... non-identical, to me? I have tentatively donethis, and suspect there is another subsense by whichtongue specifically meansFrench kiss, but I could be wrong; please discuss and/or undo if you think my edit is problematic or can be improved upon...- -sche(discuss)21:33, 1 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
this definition line is quite vague. I am not particularly knowledgeable about this subject but comparing the definitions here and on Wikipedia, they are quite different.Juwan (talk)23:36, 1 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
The term is used by US left-wingers and conservatives for conspiracies made by liberals or Democrats (hence blue). Etymology is sourced at Wikipedia and the quote section. Wikipedia uses secondary sources to define the conspiracies themselves and not necessarily the usage of the word, but the current definition doesn't seem to have any problems and describes the usage fairly accurately.Bartanaqa (talk)01:11, 2 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
i know nothing about Russian and less about this word, but i know, among English speakers, some words have multiple common pronunciations (even if some may be mispronunciations). IsPorsche 1 syllable or 2? Isbeloved 2 syllables or 3? IsTokyo pronounced "tow key oh" or "toke yo"? Is the "e" inRio Grande silent? The "e" inOregon? Then there'sresume, which changes its meaning depending if it's a 2-syllable verb or 3-syllable noun (sometimes spelledrésumé orresumé, even if my spellchecker complains about them).
i guess my point is,ye may be correct that this Russian word has 6 syllables, andthou may be correct that it has 5; thou were definitely correct to raise the question. i'll see you and raise another question: Are dialects, accents, orhomographs involved here?
In general, words may have more than one pronunciation; if so, we aim at giving all. For example, forTokyo,Oregon,library and many other words we list both disyllabic and trisyllabic pronunciations. Here, however, we are discussing aspecific word. Do you have a suggestion for a possible pronunciation other than the one given above? ‑‑Lambiam19:46, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Could anyone please check if the quote I added to the entry is put under the correct sense? I’m not exactly sure if the usage is any random capital cities located in the world, or actually refers to the capitals of important nations and hence alludes to strategic seats of government.Inqilābī15:47, 3 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
In context, the choice of capitals obviously matters (Moscow and Beijing aren't random choices), but that doesn't change the fact that the quote refers to capital cities (of their respective countries) located in the world, not capitalsof the world as in sense 1.PhoenicianLetters (talk)20:34, 3 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Before looking at the definition, there is definitely a difference. I would usewater line for the water supply pipe to my house andwaterline for the line marked on the hull of a boat. In pronunciation, I think there is less stress online inwaterline than inwater line. It is quite tedious to try to find cites to support the assignment of definitions to the closed and open orthography, given our lack of tools such as KWIC display of words in context.DCDuring (talk)12:32, 4 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Maybe there is some way of polling marine/nautical/shipbuilding glossaries to discern differences. I doubt that ordinary dictionaries will have our level of, erm, refinement of definitions.DCDuring (talk)12:37, 4 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
The general case is that a subset of people oftenprescriptively try to make usage/sense distinctions that align strictly with the open-versus-solid orthographic difference for compound nouns in English (that is, thecoal mine–versus–coalmine difference or thebottle cap–versus–bottlecap difference), butdescriptively such reservations are violated so often in practice that they arelost causes in most cases, and a large subset of the population of speakersgives zero fucks, and another large subset asks, "Wait, what are we talking about? Say it again?" Wiktionary should not be written to reflect theprescription except in the special cases where a specific pair of terms truly behaves that way pretty consistently in the wild. Such pairs are actually pretty rare — so rare that it is hard to think of examples off the top of one's head. I agree with Wiktionary's current handling that asserts thatair line–versus–airline is such a pair. But thewater line–versus–waterline pair is arun of the mill pair: I hold that Wiktionary should give it the{{alternative spelling of}} treatment (i.e., the standard treatment), and the same is true of thegas line–versus–gasline^ pair. I realize that there is abright line lacking in all this, but there is some underlying mechanism of a much stronger morphological gap^ that goes on with the special-case pairs, whereby one member of the pair feels weird if you violate the norm, and thus the other member of the pair plays along. For example,airline (solid styling) wants to be the air-travel one so badly that the orthographic enforcement happens. But a difficulty with this topic (for all pairs) is that the corpus will pretty much always serve you loads of attestations of the "distasteful" violations of the prescription (for example, "Southwest is her favorite air line [sic]" and "I hooked up the filter to theairline [sic]." Which means that choosing acutpoint for which ones "ought to be" called "misspellings" is not abright line. And yet theair line–versus–airline pair "feels" like it belongs on the strict side to people with theknack, which means that even without any bright line, there's a real discretization potential, via "I know it when I see it." Meanwhile much of the population is like,lol its hilarious that you even care [sic].Quercus solaris (talk)17:22, 4 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
PS: I've noticed over the years that in the aughts a lot of Wiktionary entries were written reflecting the notion that the open-versus-solid orthographic difference was reliably a true key to the kingdom ofword-sense disambiguation, in a way that ignoreddescriptive reality. Some of them have felt pretty silly when I run into them. But I don't think that there are many of those left anymore, because the ones that feel silly have largely been revised in later years (i.e., via a switch to{{alternative spelling of}} or{{alternative form of}} (I hold that{{alternative spelling of}} is the best choice for this subclass).Quercus solaris (talk)17:43, 4 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Admittedly it is a toss-up (neither answer is wrong), but my gut would go with the solid one for this pair,waterline. That's what MWU and MWC both do. In contrast, AHD enters the pair s.v. "water line or waterline", but for the makeup/cosmetics sense it prefaces its def with "waterline" [solid], which we are to take as indicating that that sense seems to stick to the solid form pretty well. I wouldn't have Wiktionary bother with that detail, though, because I'd bet five bones that internet makeup forums would show me plenty of both forms if I hunted for attestations there.Quercus solaris (talk)19:03, 4 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
See[1],[2]: are these euphemisms, or offensive? AFAICT, the reason that the user is offering for them being offensive ("referring to minor-attraction as "love" [is] sugarcoating") explains that they are euphemisms.- -sche(discuss)16:24, 5 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Hmm. It makes one realize/consciously appreciate that it is possible to be euphemistic and offensive at the same time, because the speaker or writer has euphemistic intent and the listener or reader finds the term offensive. I can definitely see what the anon is getting at. It would be like calling Hannibal Lector an appreciator of the human form, or something like that, but doing so in a way that has an effect towardnormalizing orsanewashing his behavior because a backchannel of irony is missing. This is the same reason why most people consider the naming choice ofNAMBLA (i.e., what it calls itself) to be inherently offensive. I'd say that the label should have both aspects (i.e.,{{lb|en|euphemism|offensive}}). The usage note that the IP wrote could be optimized, but the thrust of it is accurate. The note should not be hidden to prevent WT's end-users from seeing it. True that there is a balance point of hiding "advanced" info from end-users, but that can be overdone (i.e., carried to a counterproductively extreme degree); and overdoing it will just leave the "less challenged" end-users feeling the need to backfill what was missing in a case like this one. The anon's reasoning is wrong in one aspect, though: their edit summary shows that they think that the word can't be a euphemism because there is no [lexicalized] syn-level relation as opposed to a hyper-level relation, but that doesn't preclude euphemistic effect at all, although I know why they think it does, which is a certain species of venial map-territory conflation.Quercus solaris (talk)17:19, 5 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Our entry suggests that this term is only used of non-existent scientists, but are we sure about that?
Is there really no evidence that a controversial scientist who some might allege isplaying God has ever been referred to as amad scientist, or that a concern about "mad scientists" has ever been raised in some corner/community?
True that the term can be used with a real-life referent; for example, someone might write, "the mad scientists at DuPont have done it again!" [either approvingly or disparagingly], or whatever. Right now WT has only a single sense for the term, which is the "stock character in fiction" sense. We could potentially add another sense below that to cover the real-life-referent uses. Without spending time pondering it yet, my brain is asking me whether that use is toopragmatic to be consideredlexical. I'd have to think through it to be sure.Quercus solaris (talk)22:21, 5 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think the "definition" is poorly written. It starts with a secondary predicate about the referent, not with the substance, which would more readily allow for a mad scientist in either a fictional or real-life context. Even in a fictional context, an audience of normal adults willingly suspend their knowledge that the context is fictional. That the 'mad scientist' originated (Did it? Our attestation is biased to favor that hypothesis.) in fiction might be a matter for etymology.DCDuring (talk)13:25, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Interesting line of thought. Could be right. I don't follow the aspect about the predicate, though: aren't tons of dict defs written that way? Or am I missing something about this one? Looking at corpus attestations, it looks like the origin is as with many other collocations that grow a figurative idiomatic sense: it begins with literal SoP permutations (i.e., with stitched-together assembled parts, such asthis one) and then takes on a new life eventually. (Perhaps it has to wait for alightning bolt before it canquicken, lol.) For example, that's clearly what happened withmillion-dollar question. For any such instance, the literal origins can be represented in Wiktionary only by the{{&lit}} sense def line. So, in this instance, "a scientist who is crazy", etc.Quercus solaris (talk)15:29, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
At first, I'd writtenpredicate, then realized that my point is more that it is a secondary (optional) characteristic. I would just slide the reference to fiction toward the end of the definition and, possibly, to the etymology. 'Suspension of disbelief' is just a secondary argument, I suppose. (ST Coleridge gets credit for the concept.)DCDuring (talk)15:44, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Did the adjectival sense ofbrat die out with Kamala Harris' political career? Is it still out there somewhere? Please add any durable recent sightings to the page or its citation page.Vox Sciurorum (talk)13:48, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Attalk:result it's suggested that there is another verb sense ofresult that isn't covered by the existing three senses. But it's not in the OED nor major AmE dictionaries, so maybe it's new or insufficiently attested. I know I've heard this usage but I don't know that I've seen it in writing or whether it's genuinely distinct from sense 1. Can anyone corroborate?207.180.169.3617:56, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Does it mean "To have a result or outcome", like sense 2, but without a complement prep. phrase headed byin? I have found an instance that is similar: "its battle will result successfully for the company and the people it serves." and "The computation resulted as follows". I had found, but lost, a similar use by a non-native speaker in the context of a computation.DCDuring (talk)20:53, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think maybe more like "to be complete (as of an analysis), deliver a result, come to a numerical conclusion", like you'd see in a pathology laboratory.207.180.169.3621:29, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think you hit the nail on the head right there: it's chiefly lab jargon. Which isn't to say that other people would never use it or would be unable to grasp its meaning — just that it's idiomatic only within that jargon. Wiktionary certainly could have a sense item for it, labeled as chiefly lab jargon.Quercus solaris (talk)22:04, 6 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
That's what I thought I was saying, but I don't think we should limit it in the definition, though usage examples or, better, citations could show the lab usage. Good look in finding the citations, unless you can think of some plausible collocations to remove the chaff.DCDuring (talk)02:55, 7 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago7 comments4 people in discussion
I noticed in the edit history and onTalk:typhoon that there was some back-and-forth a while ago about whether to add a "loose" sense that doesn't have the technical wind-speed threshold. I'm leaning towards thinking it would be appropriate to do that: like a lot of words that taxonomists have narrowed (e.g.nut orspider), each of these words was originally used by people who were not necessarily measuring the exact wind speeds, and while storm-taxonomists later came in and restricted the terms to storms with specific wind speeds (BTW, our entries assert that they should agree, but they in fact disagree, on what the exact wind speed cutoff is, 118 or 119 km/h), it seems that loose use has continued. Thoughts, objections, support?- -sche(discuss)19:08, 7 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Good idea — I support this suggestion. An attested use of these words from centuries before the twentieth would be using the nonscientific sense (i.e., big-ass horribly windy storm). It could be pretty clean; just another senseid with a fairly short def could do it.Quercus solaris (talk)20:19, 7 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I've thought it a good idea for entries likeiron, too. I think the trick is to maintain appropriate contact with the technical definition, often useful for disambiguation. MWOnline usually manages two parallel definitions; learners' dictionary sometimes (usually) dispense with taxa altogether. For many languages, the referent (perhaps just an especially) is a local species, not the referent UK, US, ANZ, or Indian speakers of English have, which may differ among themselves.DCDuring (talk)20:39, 7 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Interesting! What differences do you think a second definition ofiron would have from the 'usual' definition? I vaguely recall someone proposing to add a second definition in the past, but it was simply the same definition phrased in simpler terms (e.g. without reference to the atomic number), which AFAICT doesn't make for adifferent definition. Withhurricane, there is a difference in the definitions: there are storms which meteorologists consider "not hurricanes" (because they don't meet the wind speed threshold), which in loose use are "hurricanes".- -sche(discuss)22:46, 8 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
On our definition, we have combined a modern, 'scientific' definition with a pre-scientific or modern pragmatic definition. I don't think they refer to the same thing. Iron the element is not the same as iron the material real things are made of, even from a scientific perspective.
At one point in 2017 our definitions were:
(uncountable) A common, inexpensive metal, often black in color, that rusts, is attracted by magnets, and is used in making steel.
(uncountable, physics, chemistry, metallurgy) A metallic chemical element having atomic number 26 and symbol Fe.
That's simply, and exactly, howpolysemy works innatural language. It's correct, not incorrect, and Wiktionary's entry s.v.iron already properly covers it via its various senseids.Wrought iron isidiomatically a type ofiron, in the broader-than-Q677 sense of that word, that is, in a different sense of the word thanQ677, but semantically mostly overlapping withQ677 because Q677 makes up about 97% to 99% of wrought iron or cast iron, give or take. Itis incorrect to claim that wrought iron and cast iron are kinds of steel. No, they're not. They're chemically nearly the same in composition as steel, but they're not steel in the English as She Is Spoke. Regardinghurricane: -sche's good suggestion has now been implemented.Quercus solaris (talk)00:40, 9 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Can someone with knowledge of Arabic look at this? I think the etymology headers are numbered wrong (I think the numbering should be 1.1, 1.2, 2, 3 or 1, 2, 3, 4) but I've no knowledge of Arabic or Arabic entries so I don't wanna touch it.Horse Battery (talk)03:16, 8 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
There seems to be some inconsistency in how this diacritic(/its varieties) is handled between languages. In Bengali (ঁ) and Telugu (ఁ), they have their own language specific pages; for Gujarati (ઁ), its a translingual term; the Devanagari link (ँ) is a redirect to a page with Hindi, Nepali, and Sanskrit; and lastly, Gurmurkhi (ਁ) and Odia (ଁ) are dead links. This also doesn't include the diacritic as found in other languages such as, as fromthe Wikipedia page, Kannada (◌ಁ), Malayalam (◌ഁ), or Javanese (ꦀ) (my Sinhala (◌ඁ) font isn't supported (apparently there issome page on it though)). Also, there is a page for the Brahmi script (𑀀), but no link fromcandrabindu (as an aside, I wonder if this is the right place for the page overchandrabindu, which yields more hits on Google and is the name of the corresponding Wikipedia page. GooglenGram is still making up its mind though). What's the best solution for this?Donopi (talk)08:34, 9 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago7 comments4 people in discussion
I discovered it tonight. Many edits look OK, but the big-chunk deletions are ill-founded. (Special:Contributions/The_editor_2345) I undid some of them already. How is the best way to go about fully addressing this? My concern is not only the moves already made that will need restoring but, just as importantly, to stop the slashing and thus prevent future instances.Quercus solaris (talk)04:52, 10 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
One of the things this user is doing is deleting quite a few citations without explanation. Doing that is suspicious. Zero edit summary is for edits whose motivation is transparent to anyone who views the diff. It's not for things that smelly fishy like that.Quercus solaris (talk)04:59, 10 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I just looked atw:User:The editor 2345, which says, "This account is a sockpuppet of Autisticeditor 20 (talk · contribs · logs), and has been blocked indefinitely." Well, if they were doing to Wikipedia what they're doing to Wiktionary (i.e., "improving" it by damaging and degrading it), no wonder they're blocked indefinitely there.Quercus solaris (talk)05:12, 10 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I have blocked the user for3 days forthis and similar edits to other entries, as an initial measure, without prejudice to anyone issuing a longer block on the basis of other edits. The user hadremoved the broader sense in May (without RFV, which is notideal, but I concede it'sde facto not uncommon for people to remove stuff without RFV if they believe it's a straightforward error; I suspect you and I both have probably removed words from definitions without going to RFV); I by chance noticed that in June andreadded the sense with cites . . . so the fact that the user came back inJuly and re-removed the senseand cites is plainly unacceptable. I was debating the exact block length, and after edit-conflicting with and seeing your point that the user was indef'd on 'pedia, I have blocked for 5 days to give everyone time to discuss.- -sche(discuss)05:29, 10 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
This user has made a great number of changes to taxonomic and vernacular name entries. Some look very good (correcting out-of-date Wikispecies lists of hyponyms and hypernyms) and some less so. I have not reviewed very many. I would welcome such changes if there were a reference to a source, preferably not just WP, or some good edit summary.DCDuring (talk)17:21, 10 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
What's the recommended ratio of good-to-shitty edits? My percentage is actually 96.69% goodish edits, 1% perfect edits, 1.68% dumb stuff and 2.3% poor mathematics.Vealhurl (talk)19:43, 10 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
A very good point ("what is the answer to that question"), and I agree with the percentages given above. But my concern about 2345 specifically is that they're repeatedly wiping citations out of Wiktionary without comment for reasons that evidently amount to "I better hide the evidence that shows that my notion is wrong" or "those published quotations were using the language wrong." It's hard to explain concisely, but thetheory of mind regarding "what is happening inside this person's head that they think that this factually erroneous slashing-deletion edit was OK" is a screaming klaxon of red flags for epistemicand competence/incompetenceand bad-faith/good-faith reasons. The TLDR analytically is that Wonderfool has a self-awarelark orlarf now and again (and we can all lol about it) but WF doesn't harm Wiktionary in a deeply wounding way, whereas (in contrast) 2345's recent performance is a bit more like a stochastic hand grenade in a grocery store if left unchecked. I normally can't bearsed with watchlisting, but at the least I will be policing these egregiously stupid–and-also-probably–bad-faith errors from this user from now on, if this user is not blocked permanently. 2345, if you're reading this, you can allay my concerns by avoiding deleting entire subsenses that you fail to comprehend and purging existing citations from Wiktionary without a well-documented reason for each individual deletion (in its edit summary). I'll just add here that TTBOMK, anyone who's ever been indef-blocked at Wikipedia has been a serious problem in ways that had remained durably unfixable despite efforts at remedial teaching. 2345, if you're reading this, you can prove me wrong with good performance and good attempt at effective communication (i.e., a defensibly reasoned justification of any such edit). If those things don't happen, then "durably unfixable" would be the conclusion. And when it comes to a def of "X; especially, Y", or (closely relatedly) "# sense ¶ ## (esp.) narrower subsense", we're not going to eliminate such linguistic facts solely because some small subset of speakers don't properly comprehend them. Those speakers need to simply leave alone the aspects that they don't comprehend.Quercus solaris (talk)20:47, 10 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I got really confused when I saw the Portuguese verbgostar labelled asintransitive, since it has always been atransitive verb for me and all the dictionaries of the Portuguese language. When I looked up the definition of such terms in the glossary, I found that the definition oftransitive verb is“A verb which requires one or more objects”, which would technically include Portuguesegostar, since it is followed by an indirect object.OweOwnAwe (talk)06:23, 11 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
This thread prompted a line of thought for me aboutgustar and about how its conjugation differs by which construction is used, e.g., "me gusta XYZ" versus "yo gusto de XYZ". It's widely agreed that in the first construction, XYZ is the grammaticalsubject (leaving aside the competingagent/patient construals) and is doing an intransitive thingtoward me. It radiates its pleasantness and I am someone who can detect that radiation, lol. The second construction gets more problematic fortraditional grammar: which model for explaining it is most accurate? "I [am feeling pleasedness/affinity] [about/toward XYZ]." This reminds me a lot of the distinction that is made in (attempts at) English grammar(ization), where some of (what some people call) theprepositional verbs definitely "feel" transitive (to me and, attestedly, to many others too) but in some cases are nonetheless conventionally defined (perhaps poorly so) as intransitive-with-a-PP-adjunct (I was going to saycomplement there, but I thinkadjunct is the right term there). This is why, when it comes to "you can't shake a stick at those prices", I enteredshake a stick at as a lemma and I called it transitive. The old man isn't [shaking]v.t. [a stick]d.o. [at those prices]i.o. — rather, he's [shaking a stick at]v.t. [those prices]d.o.. Maybe somebody will overrule that later, but to me it seems superior to the alternatives.Quercus solaris (talk)16:20, 12 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:24 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The Latin section of the entry for cherubim indicates the vowel-lengths as cherūbīm, and the pronunciations offered are therefore based on stressing the penultimate syllable (-ru-). However, theLiber Usualis (in the text of the 'Te Deum' and elsewhere) indicates stress on the first syllable, spelling the word as Chérubim, implying a short u. Would it be possible to reflect this alternative vowel-length and stress pattern in the entry, and particularly for the Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation? I realize this probably has implications for the cherub entry as well.Sdoerr (talk)17:01, 11 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Aa is entered as "obsolete typography ofå". Questions:
Is this in reference to the letter sense ofå? (If so, shouldn't it instead say it's an alt form of capitalÅ?) Or is it referring to the old tendency to capitalize nouns, likeå ety 3, "river", in which case a gloss would help clarify?
Isaa obsoletetypography ofå, or is it an obsoletespelling? The "typography" template, though poorly named (suggest better names atWiktionary:Beer parlour/2025/June#T:obsolete_typography_of) was intended for cases where thespelling is the same — someone in the past who spelledheauen like that thought they were using the same letters that someone who spells itheaven today thinks they're using, it's just that we now use the glyphv where in the past they used the glyphu for that letter. Ifaa andå are actually different letters, it's an obsolete spelling.
Fixed it. Aa as a letter is indeed an obsolete typography of Å, but it was also some few writers long time ago who used to spell nouns with a capital letter (like in German), but it wasn’t so common for Nynorsk (then called Landsmål), so in this caseAa may also be obsolete spelling of Norwegian Nynorskå(“creek, river”). But am not sure if it is a good idea to add entries with capitalized spelling for every Nynorsk and Bokmål noun.Tollef Salemann (talk)20:35, 14 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
How should we word the definition used in phrases like "X is an art, not a science"? (Does our current setup of senses even make sense?)Diff changed one suboptimal wording into another wording which I think we could also (still) improve upon.- -sche(discuss)19:29, 11 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Good question. IMO, it would be great if en.Wiktionary hadan appendix to cover these (or the top X most important ones, where X = 30? 100? more? I'd need to ponder them to estimate how many). If anyone has time + priority to build one, it would be cool. Could build it in a userspace subpage to reach critical mass before releasing it to the Appendix namespace. The thing about such units is that even if they can't be lemmas in the dictionary mainspace and even if they don't fit consistently into the diachrony of the Etymology section historical trees, they are quite important synchronically. If I were tutoring to improve theliteracy andreading comprehension of any kid from middle school through undergrad (maybe even primary school?), I would certainly want such a list to give them. I feel like it's been eons since I saw a list of them anywhere — the kind of list whose items look exactly like the example you gave above. Not justrect- (which any dictionary covers in its mainspace/main vocabulary) but also-rect- (as presented above). I just checked several big major dictionaries of English and found nothing of the sort, nofront matter orback matter list. WTF? Have I really not seen such an animal since some smart teacher or curriculum showed me one when I was a kid? If so, that's a ridiculous commentary on a lot of things about publishing and education and book store reference sections. You can find books of them on Amazonif you look for them (Joshi 2014,Dictionary of Root Words: Greek and Latin Roots, looks good), but IMO if you buy access to a general dictionary (digital, print, or both), such an appendix should be included in what you get. If you want a population to be literate then you can't make important pedagogical tools be something thatthey have toknow to search for.Quercus solaris (talk)15:32, 14 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. This reminds me too ofmy 'Remedial stuff' subpage. I wish it weren't such a hundreds-of-hours project to build such a thing to the point of its being decent, comprehensive, well-formed, proofread, etc. At least, that's what it is for me, when doing it myself the honest way (i.e, good old-fashioned honest 'how we did things when I was a kid walking to school in the snow uphill both ways'). That's the only thing stopping me from just building both of them my(own-damn)self (i.e., both a combining-forms appendix and a synchronic-viewpoint word-root appendix) and then dumping them on the world forspite, like, "here, I did it cause none of you other nerds could bearsed." But I may not get around to it anytime this decade or next, because even just reading real news sources and books (not social-media garbage impersonations of real news sources), and improving Wiktionary's mainspace incrementally in response to that in a way that'smore or less comparable to a crossword-puzzle pastime, is runningflat out on my available free time/pastime. TBD. Relatedly, though, as strange as it feels to say this, it might possibly be true: either now or within the next 5 years, perhaps people might be able to ask genAI togin up such a list for them and have the result actually not suck and actually be close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades? And of course they could just buy an ebook such as Joshi 2014 for a few bucks, too. Relatedly, someone such as myself could ask genAI for a rough draft and then crawl over every line of it to properly iterate it and vet it. If you do the second partproperly (i.e., thoroughly plus intelligently plus knowledgeably) then the final resulting end-product is notnot thoroughly human-vetted all the way down to the very last character. Thoughts out loud.Quercus solaris (talk)17:45, 14 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Why not include sayrecti- as a Latin combining form of rectus too? That is exactly what I am referring to, and not only in the etymological section of the entries or inferrably from the inflectional tables.87.218.84.9720:32, 21 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Right on —recti- as well. Also: I've seen appendixes full of ISV combining forms that are prefixive or suffixive, and appendixes full of synchronic distillation like Joshi 2014 (which treat the word-internal units just as duly as the word-initial and word-terminal units), but I don't recall seeing one that was both of those combined; but there's nothing stopping anyone from building a combined one, except for the time it would take. Joshi's entries for-dol- and-dom- are examples of entries that wouldn't be found in a typical biomedical ISV combining form list, for example; but any student learning English to a well-educated degree should certainly be introduced to-dol- and-dom- entries such as those. I realize that I keep mentioning that particular book, but it's not because I'm fixated on that particular book — only that it is just a good representative example of its ilk.Quercus solaris (talk)00:01, 22 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I considerhypothermia#Etymology, in its current form as I write this, to be very good because it shows first a diachronic and then a synchronic view, both of which are useful and important. The synchronic viewpoint can respectably be any of the three surface analyses that you mentioned (i.e.,hypo- +therm- +-ia, orhypo- + -therm- +-ia, orhypo- +-therm +-ia). The first of those is best for Wiktionary's purposes (I'm going to tweak the hyphen placement in the entry so as to use that one, in a moment); the second one is useful pedagogically but Wiktionary won't enter-therm- just as it likewise won't enter-dol- or-dom-, and that's OK; many other dictionaries don't either. Such things don't have to function as headwords in any work except a work of the type that the Joshi book exemplifies. They aren't headwords in any way except synchronically. The big thing is having people recognize one or more of these three synchronic analyses rather than being oblivious to them all. Wiktionary's Etymology section can show the first one and it does enough pedagogical work even without the others. Someday an appendix of Wiktionary could show the ones that its Etymology sections can't show (e.g.,-therm-,-dol-,-dom-, with a list of words for each).Quercus solaris (talk)01:05, 26 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Some of them get further away from direct diachronic connections than others do, but even then they're valuable as synchronic recognition of a cognate syllable or string of syllables. They can't be used diachronically, but they're important for synchronic deepening of comprehension. For example, they help a monolingual English speaker to think about how the wordsresurrection,resurgence,insurrection, andinsurgency are related to one another in ways etymonic and ways semantic (both).Quercus solaris (talk)02:50, 27 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The Lithuanian word for Frenchman,prancūzas is derived from various words all beginning with "F". You have to go all the way back until you get to PIE "*preng-" to find a "P". So why the "P" in Lithuanian? "F" isn't part of the native alphabet but it's pretty common in loanwords.DenisHowe (talk)09:47, 13 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I took a Lithuanian language course at the University of Vilnius for five months. The professor told us thatprancūzas was a very early borrowing, so early that at that point Lithuanian had not even developed the concept of the /f/ sound. There are no native stems that have /f/ either, so it's exclusive to loanwords, chiefly from Russian or Polish.Insaneguy1083 (talk)22:46, 13 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
1. A portable telephone that connects with the telephone network with radio transmissions
2. A portable telephone that connects with the cellular telephone network
Are these ever distinguished, e.g. "He wasn't using a mobile phone, he was using a radio phone that connected via radio transmissions instead [of a cellular network]."? Merriam Webster, Dictionary.com ("any wireless telephone that operates over a relatively large area, as a cell phone or PCS phone"), Cambridge ("a phone that is connected to the phone system by radio instead of by a wire, and can be used anywhere its signals can be received") list only one sense, as (it seems) does Wikipedia; it seems like our senses should be merged into one sense, like ~A portable telephone that makes and receives calls over a radio frequency link, often via a cellular network architecture. or something.- -sche(discuss)15:59, 13 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think there are contexts where it is clear thatmobile phone includes more kinds of phones thatcell phone.
Most mobile phone users are unaware of the network technology or frequency their phone uses. So, in effect, the terms are synonymous for them. Telephone service and device providers may use multiple technologies/frequencies, so most users have even less reason to care or be informed about the underlying technology. Satellite phones are still distinct because of high cost and extended coverage.
Cell phone andcellphone, combined, seem to be about 3x as frequent asmobile phone.Cellular phone andcellular telephone were more common that either before 1998, but are relatively infrequent now.Satellite phone has about 6% of the frequency ofmobile phone.
I would think that the first definition of mobile phone above should end "wirelessly, withany radio signal(s)/transmission(s)", with the second definition being "Acellular telephone", displayed as a subsense.Satellite phone could be a subsense or a hyponym. The oldcordless phone,wireless phones that connected with a base station connect to the telephone network, almost always via a landline, may fit withinmobile phone as well, as hyponym or subsense. The wordwirelessly helps resolve the polysemy ofradio in "radio transmission".DCDuring (talk)17:26, 13 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
«Are these noteworthy enough terms to add to Wiktionary?» — well, at leastизбинг(izbing) seems to satisfyWT:ATTEST (unless I’m missing something), so I guess it can be added.
Not sure about the rest. E.g.музеинг(muzeing) seems to be used either as the proper name (some specific student project) or as joke. More such jokes are easily found (e.g. «Приятного чтенинга»[4], « «Нытинг» и «спатинг» - новые soft и hard skills нашего времени»[5]), but I’m not sure they warrant the inclusion into a dictionary.
Neither am I convinced how productive is-инг(-ing). Inизбинг(izbing), it’s apparently based onглэмпинг(glɛmping,“glamping”) with first root substituted. In the end, I think “productive — not productive” is not a binary category. It’ssomewhat productive, but I’m not sure it’s productive enough to warrant an article of its own.Хтосьці (talk)15:06, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I wonder whether the use modifying adjectivals or adverbials is less widely acceptable that the use modifying verbs. That might make for different subsenses, to accommodate different labels.DCDuring (talk)23:04, 13 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
The fact that "They walked some and talked some" sounds perfectly standard to me but "She's some better" and "It looked some like Muriel" sound downright ungrammatical makes me want to give them separate senses. —Mahāgaja ·talk09:41, 15 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Also, substituting "somewhat" shows there's a difference: "*they walked somewhat" doesn't make sense. I would say that "some" in "they walked some" is modifying the verb, but in the other usage it's modifying the adjectives.Chuck Entz (talk)10:43, 15 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
That last above should cover most dialects outside of Spain, including slang. I think "chute" is a spurious addition and should be removed.Shenme (talk)04:31, 14 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I say go for it: remove it, and if they care enough to prove you wrong, then they're free to add it back and show/explain why it's valid, and if they can't be arsed, then F em anyway. This viewpoint is valid for things that leave everyone else scratching their heads and not finding any verification when they go looking for it, especially when those things seem like drivebys from a rando who can't be arsed otherwise.Quercus solaris (talk)05:23, 14 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
In the Glyph Origin section of蟲, the small seal form given looks nothing like the triplication of the small seal form of虫; instead, it looks suspiciously similar to輿. Furthermore, the historical form given in the entry for 蟲 is (the small seal form of舁) + (the small seal form of車), making it more suspicious.Intolerable situation (talk)09:08, 14 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I came across Irishscáthán bearrtha glossed as "shaving mirror", which is (at the moment) a red link. Do we think this is entry-worthy and not merely sum of parts? Clearly any mirror can be used when shaving, but I'd say ashaving mirror is specifically a magnifying mirror that's just large enough to show the face. Other terms for the same thing (all of which are red links) may includemagnifying mirror (perhaps more specific than just any mirror that magnifies?),makeup mirror andvanity mirror. —Mahāgaja ·talk09:39, 15 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Not all shaving mirrors are concave.Pop. Mechanics Feb. 1983 had plans for a wall-hung thing with a flat mirror, a shelf, and drawers. Shaving mirrors were or are wall-hung, folding (travel?), and table-top. Modern shaving may have a surrounding light or a light that illuminates the face below the eyes. They seem to be mirrors for shaving, not always distinguishable from mirrors for makeup.DCDuring (talk)20:52, 17 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
logs has some translation on the page that should not be there
Thanks for noticing this. I have undone the addition of the edit, with an edit summary explaining the issue and asking the editor to check whether the translation (based on the definition of the K. Naga word) is supposed to go atstore or somewhere else.- -sche(discuss)14:35, 17 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The異體字字典 says that夨 is written with 4 strokes (and that奊 is written with 10) but⿺夨口 is only written with 6. I assume this is because the stroke ("CJK STROKE SZP") is split into two. Should the traditional stroke count for the first two be updated? Also, same thing with𡆵 being counted as 9 strokes (even though𣶒 is written with 8).Người mang giấm (talk)18:01, 17 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
It’s an interesting case, because the 異體字字典 often takes into account the original form of writing, generally without standardization/unification etc.. Owing to this, case by case disparities in stroke counts which on the surface would seem to have the same components will occasionally occur. For stroke counts, I have always used the Unicode stroke count values, except for the cases when they are clearly in error (which does occur occasionally) however I would defer to other users on what the official policy would be
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Conjunction definition 1: "During the same time that": "driving while intoxicated".
5: "(media, public policy) Used to denote a person experiencing racial profiling when performing a seemingly benign activity":shopping while black,traveling while Muslim,gardening while black.
Someoneon the talk page in 2022 suggested, and I think I agree, that these don't seem like separate senses. Would it be better to turn sense 5 into a short usage note instead of a definition, about the way "driving while intoxicated"-type usage ofwhile has been generalized (somewhat jocularly?) to "shopping while black"-type usage?- -sche(discuss)05:56, 18 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Sense 5 might not qualify as a distinct sense, but it's certainly able to be distinguished: it's based on the specific usage of "while" in the names of offenses, such as "driving while intoxicated". In those names of real offenses, "while" has only its ordinary meaning; however, in the derived names for activities that are legal but being treated as offenses, "while" means "specifically the 'while' from names of offenses".
I think the fact that this reference is being made should be part of sense 5. I don't care what form that takes, I just think sense 5 would be incomplete without it.TooManyFingers (talk)20:55, 22 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yes, this is very strange. I would suggest to editors not to disclose their emails or agree to upload files to the Internet Archive on behalf of Yuliadhi. There is no reason why Yuliadhi can't create their own account at the Internet Archive. At worst, it is some scheme to obtain people's email addresses for phishing purposes. —Sgconlaw (talk)11:57, 18 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
# {{surname|en|from=Irish}} anglicized from {{m|ga|[[Mac]] Óda||son of [[Odo]]}}.
Asurname from Irish anglicized fromMac Óda(“son ofOdo”).
By the way, the current version linksÓda toOdo#Irish, but theOdo page only has English, not Irish. Should we skip linkingCody toOdo until someone adds an Irish entry?
Our entries for Irish surnames always include theMac,Ó etc., element if present, so it should actually say:
# {{surname|en|from=Irish}} anglicized from {{m|ga|Mac Óda|lit=son of Óda}}
although Óda is a genitive and I don't know what its nominative is. It could be Óda, Ód, or Óid. There's no particular reason to believe this Irish name descends from LatinOthō; even after Christianization, the Irish tended to keep to their traditional Goidelic names rather than borrow continental ones. (Not exceptionlessly, of course, but as a general tendency.) —Mahāgaja ·talk14:39, 18 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Mahagaja,SemperBlotto,Linshee: Thanks to everyone striving to improve Wiktionary. Now, who's your daddy, Cody? Based on a coarse browse of edit history:
Mahāgaja seems to thinkMac Óda could be the son of Óda, Ód, or Óid, but not necessarily Othō? Am i understanding you correctly?
11 January 2006, it looks like SemperBlotto called Cody "Irishson of Otto"
Mac Óda is definitely the son of Óda, Ód, or Óid, but it isn't necessarily the case that Óda, Ód, or Óid is the Irish equivalent ofOtho. I wouldn't rule it out 100%, but it strikes me as somewhat unlikely. If it isn't a native Goidelic name, it's more likely to be Norse than Latin. —Mahāgaja ·talk17:01, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don’t have much to add butthis source suggests it’s of Norman origin meaning 'Son of Odo or Otho'. Patrick Woulfe is a fairly credible source for Irish names and surnames as far as I’m aware.51.37.22.8818:35, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yes, but he does say it's a "Teutonic" (i.e. Germanic) name, not the Latin cognomenOtho, which is probably of Etruscan origin. A Germanic name brought over by the Normans is of course a distinct possibility. —Mahāgaja ·talk21:25, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Is this (as it is currently categorized) a "location adverb"?The Department of the Bleeding Obvious is not a literal place, but more importantly, I don't know that it's even a notional place: if real-world "statements from the Department of Defense this week revealed" something, I would not assume the announcement originated from a specific place: it could have been made by the relevant department head while she was anywhere, in her office or in a newsroom being interviewed or visiting another country.- -sche(discuss)01:26, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
True, it doesn't need to refer to a place in my opinion either. It could be conceived as such, depending on who you are; for me, I did envision it as a room in which people were working to produce the most expected and ordinary statements, which perhaps could be considered part of the humorous setting :-)Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs)01:31, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
What a great entry. This needs to be read figuratively, as you understand: the best real-world equivalent is probably a department within a newspaper (do these have to be physical places? no, but traditionally they are, and this phrase seems to harking back to that). I think the category is valid, in the same way that something named after a fictional Pokémon (heaven forbid) would still be aneponym by virtue of coming from a name.2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:C876:B307:3ECC:57BD06:35, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
First time posting anything here. Can we check the authenticity of the second English meaning ofpugilist? I've written my observations in discussions, but in hindsight I should have just put it here sorry :/222.111.92.24509:42, 19 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I'm tempted to suggest Urban Dictionary, just because they send so much crap our way we ought to send some their way. 😅 Maybe the (non-WMF)conlang wiki? Or maybe they too don't accept just anyone and everyone's new creations; I don't know. Maybe just the same microcountries.fandom.com page you've been using.- -sche(discuss)18:41, 20 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
A possible project for somebody other than me.
Tolstoy is used as internet slang related to excessively long comments (as long as a pre-revolution Russian novel). But I can't provide citations and it's not clearly in widespread use. Maybe it's not really common enough to include on Wiktionary. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to add the proper definition and cite it.Vox Sciurorum (talk)19:46, 20 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago3 comments3 people in discussion
At least some entries in this set are SoPs, aren't they? Perhaps instead of "X parent" and "X parenting", we should just define it at "X", if not already redundant to what is there:
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The term "alcoholic beverage" is included in the "Derived terms" section ofalcoholic.However, on attempting to create the page, it seems that it was deleted previously twice.My guess is that the meaning is just the same as applying the adjectivealcoholic to the nounbeverage and so it does not meet the criteria for being a separate entry.If that is the case, shouldn't "alcoholic beverage" be removed from the "Derived terms" ofalcoholic?
@Kaloan-koko When an entry is deleted through RFD or RFV, the discussion that led to the deletion is archived on the talk page of the deleted entry. SeeTalk:alcoholic beverage. As for the "Derived terms" reference: that was just added a few months ago. I've removed it.Chuck Entz (talk)
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
One sense of "specious" is"Employing fallacious but deceptively plausible arguments; deceitful." Another sense is"Having an attractive appearance intended to generate a favorable response; deceptively attractive."
The word "pretextual" is listed as a synonym of the "attractive" sense. I think it isn't associated with that sense, and that it really belongs with the "deceitful" sense. I'm almost confident enough of this to just move the synonym myself - but not quite.TooManyFingers (talk)20:37, 22 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The North American and (I think) British use of the term almost always entails the heavily salted kind that is chiefly used in Italian cuisine, but elsewhere in the world the fish isn't prepared that way. Should the specific salted form be mentioned as a separate definition as well?Insaneguy1083 (talk)12:29, 23 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't think we have good information, eg, attestation, authority, to support a lot of refinement of the existing definition in that direction. But see“anchovy”, inOneLook Dictionary Search. for how other references handle the term.DCDuring (talk)21:37, 23 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Sense 2 seems SOP; it could be replaced with{{&lit}}. Is sense 1 also SOP, or no? The usage note points out that it's not (usually) the government which is collecting it, but as senses 2 and 3 oftax cover, taxes can come from entities other than governments: the Mafia exacts "taxes" (google books:"Mafia tax",google books:"Mafia taxed"), dogs exactthe cheese tax, there is theFanum tax, etc. I guess it is somewhat unusual in that this is being referred to as a "tax" but is AFAICT purely voluntary.- -sche(discuss)03:03, 24 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I grew up calling chess[ʃataˈɾɒ̃ːʒ] and thinking I was speaking French, and I only found out as an adult that there's no such word aschatarange and that it's really a hyperforeignized pronunciation of Arabicشَطَرَنْج(šaṭaranj). I added that pronunciation underNorth Levantine Arabicشطرنج(šaṭaranj), but I want to add references so it's not just dangling there, so I had two questions:
I've found some references below, but everything that seems usable is a mention of the term, not a use. Can they go atCitations:شطرنج?
From these references, it almost seems that, for Lebanese people in the same boat as me, there effectivelyis a Lebanese Frenchchatarange orchataronge. Does any of this support creating that page with the definition#{{lb|fr|Lebanon}} [[chess]]?
Misc findings
2017, Carine Khouri Naja,Revue française de psychanalyse, volume81, Presses Universitaires de France,→DOI,→ISBN,→ISSN, pages167–179:
L’exemple clinique ci-dessous illustre bien les enjeux du multilinguisme dans le milieu analytique libanais. Vincent est un analysant polyglotte pétri de destructivité, en proie à une compulsion de répétition. Il a passé des mois à parler de « chatarange » sans que ceci n’évoque en moi rien de plus que l’image toute lisse d’un échiquier. Ce n’est qu’au bout de plusieurs séances au cours desquelles il ressassait ses histoires de « chatarange » que je pus enfin entendre, pour la première fois, « échecs » dans « chatarange » qui signifie en fait le jeu d’échecs. Je pus enfin comprendre et interpréter son rapport à l’échec, à la pulsion de mort et à la compulsion de répétition. Cette séance a constitué un moment marquant dans la cure de Vincent, comme une porte qu’on entrouvre pour laisser entrer les pulsions de vie.
I am from an Arabic country, Lebanon, and we don't call the bishop "Al Fil", like some website say, at least in my country we don't, maybe some other arabic country did, not us, and we still play Chaturanga (but i don't). We call itChatarange, it's a French name, since France was the mandate for Lebanon long time ago.
Is this saying that the bishop is called achatarange instead of aفِيل(fīl, literally“elephant”)? Or is it just saying that the game is called Chatarange and pointing out that it sounds similar tochaturanga?
But did you know that about 1500 years ago during the Gupta Empire, the game of Chaturanga came into existence. To simulate the Indian military strategy of that time, the people of Northern India used pieces to depict the four divisions of the military: the infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry. And guess what is the Chaturanga game?? It is the Chess game we all know. Do you want more? In french, we call itChatarange and in Arabic Shataranj.
Here he treatschatarange as a French word separate from Arabicشَطَرَنْج(šaṭaranj)
These two articles on the officialLebanese Forces site havechatarange in the URL but don't remark on it anywhere in the article, indicating that it's seen as a normal word:
Latest comment:27 days ago5 comments5 people in discussion
Hi. Been listening to the songMetaphysics, which I really like. Only problem is that I got no idea what he's talking about. I added some rfdefs topancake box "I could put mymama face on the pancake box", andcarrot andjam "I got the jammy loaded in one hand/Threw a few shots at two carrots and one jam". Other mention of food/drink in the song is the line "Love to count money, sip Goose while I play with your vagina" and "flip bricks like a spatula". So, the song is clearly an recipe, which I am looking forward to trying with mybitch-hoegirlfriendbitch hoe. I sent a fax to Starks Enterprises, his label, politely asking for some footnotes regarding "certain items of lexicographical interest", but they haven't replied yet. Maybe my only true friends, you fellow Wiktionarians, can help with these definitions. PS. I got you all in check, I get shit warm and wetVealhurl (talk)17:42, 26 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Mr Killah is only my friend’s cousin’s neighbour’s dog walker but I’m led to believe ‘Threw a few shots at two carrots and one jam’ means ‘Shot a few bullets at two police officers and one (police) car’, based on CRS ‘jam jar’ meaning ‘car’, probably changed simply to ‘jam’ by poetic licence so it sounds better when juxtaposed with ‘jammy’ and ‘carrot’.Overlordnat1 (talk)11:32, 27 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
pancake box is only SoP; true regarding "get his mother's face onto packaged pancake mix, a bit likeAunt Jemima".Goose is an ellipsis ofGrey Goose. He asserts that he's so good at flipping bricks (achievingturnover of his drug inventory, bricks of cocaine) that the figurative image of flipping flapjacks with a spatula captures an idea of the speed and volume.Quercus solaris (talk)16:43, 27 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Deare Sirs:
I want to know what the difference would be between Wikionary'stake up (transitive, with 'on') andtake up on for the meaning "to accept somebody's offer or wager".
The difference appears to be in the object used, i.e. "throwing dice" vs "throwing a number (on dice)", but if we compare the corresponding senses atroll (sense 14) perhaps we should make the number sense at throw into a sub-sense instead. Side note: I wonder if the definitions might be considered circular too, with throw being defined as "to roll" and roll defined as "to throw".Horse Battery (talk)10:58, 27 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Does unparagoned mean "the best"? If it does mean that, then no, paragonedwould (if people even used it, that is) mean "has been equalled - the competition has caught up", or "something else is now a better one of these". It wouldn't mean "the worst". If people used it, that is.TooManyFingers (talk)19:44, 30 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
@MuDavid,Mx. Granger I want to verify the pronunciation of this word, as I have tried to create it based on the pronunciation of other Middle Vietnamese entries without any knowledge of Middle Vietnamese pronunciation at all. --ChemPro (talk)16:37, 27 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:27 days ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Atdollar, we have one sense, "for currency in some parts of the world, including Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and elsewhere". Atpiastre, every place has its own sense (of which only the last two, use ofpiastre as a subunit and use as an unofficial term for a dollar, seem to differ in a way greater than the variousdollars or various otherpiastres differ). Which approach is better: dividedollar into different senses, or combine some ofpiastre's senses?- -sche(discuss)20:00, 28 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
I guess it would be better to combine some of the senses. I was also wondering if it is a good idea to have a usage note listing all the countries that use the dollar or piastre, as the case may be. On the one hand one could argue that this is encyclopedic information that is best left to Wikipedia. On the other, it will dissuade editors from adding the information directly to the definition, which will then become unnecessarily long. —Sgconlaw (talk)21:46, 29 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:27 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
This 漢字 "" "" is a Cantonese dialect character. It is a really fascinating & rare example of a CJK character which was created in a modern context and subsequently encoded in Unicode.
The Romanized version of this 漢字 "hea" was actually the Wiktionary foreign word of the day on March the 18th, 2016. "", was finally encoded in September of 2025 at (u+3312e).
I have created the article for the 漢字 itself, but as a non-Cantonese speaker I would defer to others on how this article ought to be formatted.
I would love to hear some input from Cantonese users
Latest comment:27 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
It seems to me that the definitions atCelsius andCelsius scale are redundant to each other. Would it be better to have the full definition atCelsius scale and simply defineCelsius as "measured on the Celsius scale" or perhaps "relating to the Celsius scale"?
Furthermore, I think we're missing noun senses atCelsius as "short forCelsius scale" (as in "Celsius is better than Fahrenheit") and "short fordegree(s) Celsius" (as in "it's 15 Celsius today").
The same is of course true forFahrenheit andFahrenheit scale, though I'm not sure about the other temperature scales.
Latest comment:20 days ago3 comments3 people in discussion
The obsolete past tense of the verb "eat" is "eat". How is it (or was it) pronounced? I suppose it probably changed over time.
Is the more current (but uncommon) "et" just a respelling of the older "eat"? For that matter, is "ate" a respelling of past-tense "eat"? Or are they separate entities?TooManyFingers (talk)19:28, 30 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
By no means am I drawing on facts, here, but, if the old spelling "eat" is accurate, than it ought to have been pronounced something like /eat/, literally, so it would make sense that this becomes /e:t/ and then /eit/ (please excuse my poor IPA typography), which does correspond to "ate"; and "et" seems like another direction that /e:t/ could have gone (shortening instead of diphthongizing). But no idea in reality.Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs)10:38, 6 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I'm pretty sureate is a direct inheritance from Old Englishǣt,ǣton. But we mustn't confuse spelling and pronunciation here. The pronunciation/ɛt/ is still widespread in the UK, but the people who use that pronunciation nevertheless spell itate. I suspect the pronunciation/ɛt/ (however spelled) is analogical to weak verbs ending int ord that show vowel shortening in the past tense, such asbleed/bled,breed/bred,feed/fed,lead/led,light/lit,meet/met,[ɹiːd]/[ɹɛd],speed/sped etc. —Mahāgaja ·talk11:04, 6 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:26 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Italian ice,shaved ice,shave ice,water ice,snowball,snow cone (see also:granita). We define these as if each was a separate dessert. How many are actually the same thing? There seem to be two—maybe three, but probably not seven—production methods, which may or may not be definitional: some are made by granulating ice and blending flavouring into it, whereas others are made by granulating ice and pouring flavouring over it. (There are alsoslushies/slushes, but these are distinguished by being drinks which may be consumed through straws, rather than desserts consumed like ice cream i.e. with spoons or by biting.)- -sche(discuss)02:08, 1 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
If it exists outside of one friendgroup / street gang and AI hallucinations. Because only then we havelexicalization beyondidiolect. This one does not.
I misunderstood your title before opening the present page: the mostpopular pages I made, by hit counts, are the ones I personally cared the least about. The best pages are plant names that are never clicked.Fay Freak (talk)18:34, 1 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Read CFI. You need enough usage examples spanning enough time (and be aware of the use-mention distinction) not used with an inside group/single person.Vininn126 (talk)19:18, 1 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
How do you know about the currency and meaning of the word? You have to do a reality check. Quotations are a method to manifest it to other dictionary users and editors so it is devoid of suspicion.Fay Freak (talk)20:03, 1 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
i know that you have to not just put "stepteen-in-law" in its title and you didn't put anything in it, that will get speedy deleted, put a meaning onto it, and if you want, you can put quotations in itNail123Real (talk)14:31, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:24 days ago9 comments4 people in discussion
I changed the first sense to use{{&lit}}, as it appears to be sum-of-parts. Assuming this is uncontroversial (which it very well may not be), we would surely remove the translations (all of which wouldn't satisfyWT:THUB) associated with this sense, right?—Polomo ⟨ oi! ⟩ ·20:11, 1 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't know. At least it is good for SEO.
I have the suspicion that in some tropical island languages there are particular terms satisfying WT:THUB, even if the occurrence of shark attacks themselves be mythological.Fay Freak (talk)20:37, 1 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't follow the logic of that removal. Maybe I am missing something? No matter whether any of those translations that were there referred to the fig sense or the lit sense, a THUB can exist for them to point to. The fig ones would be grouped under a sense-marker and the lit ones would be grouped under a sense-marker, and some of the items would fall under both.Quercus solaris (talk)03:49, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Aha. Thanks for that. I hadn't read those in a long while and had forgotten how stringent they are (or seem, to me). I will have to sit and think about why they exist and what is bulletproof enough to get past them.Quercus solaris (talk)04:03, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
1966, Great Britain. Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts,Reports, page208:
For what can he have done with all that money taken upon me which I have accepted, besides 100l. sterling there taken the 10th January of Samual de Fisher which I must protest, since he cannot have mispent normistraded already so much ?
Ismispent a Wiktionary editor's typo, an accurate transcription of a misspelling in the quoted source, an accurate transcription of a rare or outdated alternate spelling, or something else?
While this is adjectival use of pronouns, it does not make them adjectives. It is a use of pronouns asadjuncts to a noun, similarly to thenoun adjuncts in
This isn’t a city problem; it’s a suburb problem.
You can do this with almost any word class:
This shouldn’t be a “how” question but a “when” question.
This doesn’t look like a fix-it attitude; it’s more a slash-and-burn approach.
Notice that pronouns have cases, unlike nouns, but it is notyour andtheir that are used: that is why such uses are linguistically outstanding.87.218.84.9717:47, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
In that quoted position, anything at all can be used. Grammar doesn't come into it. This is a "we haven't got a word for this in English, but that doesn't matter" problem. If a pronoun is the quoted part, we use the object form because that is the default form: it is what we always use in every position, in normal English, except for explicit subjects and possessives.Hiztegilari (talk)18:55, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I agree with your remark, especially when text is highlighted (here, with quotation marks). But I want to reiterate my point when dealing specifically with pronouns. Maybe its instead resorted to by non native speakers as a lingua-franca characteristic?87.218.84.9719:08, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think it is normal colloquial speech. What's more, I was not surprised to find it in the wild with the pronouns in the nominative: 'Homelessness Is a “We” Problem, Not a “They” Problem'.DCDuring (talk)22:58, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:24 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I have come to a concern that I am not actually sure whether,even among the traditionalist cohort, the word 'gender' is actually particularly often used as a synonym for the wordsex (sense 2), rather than the social sense that would be 'assumed' there to arise from the sex. The quotations from Lady Wortley Montagu (1723) and Mary Giles et al. (2004) are not particularly helpful in that regard. Dickens (1849) and the Mass Effect quotations and the medication (#:) example do look to use it in that sense.
I would think of putting current sense 3 above sense 2 (and, additionally, put the current obsolete sense 1 below even the linguistic senses and hardware sense. Hell I would do it right now if writing this post wasn't much less mental than looking at the wikitext).Wirecruncher (talk)15:55, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think sense 2 ofsex should be deleted as a kind of reverse causality. The category is not “based on sexuality or gender roles”, the concept of sexuality is from mid-19th-century biologism, wherefromsex in the sense of jigajig was clipped, and ultimately the mention thereof is redundant to the reproductive roles mentioned in the sense 1, and the concept ofgender as you think and polity society uses to assume nowadays is even a century later than this; and nobody formerly or presently could assume that in an organism forming societies there is no cultural baggage coming with the turf of reproductive roles determined by sperm lottery, so there is noseparate category. The understanding of gender as synonymous to biologistsex has become obsolete sorely fast indeed; the quote from science-fiction, prone to any kind of arbitrary language abuse, does not subtract from the observation.
As a sorting from the most basic senses on, the current order ofgender makes sense, and thereby serves explanation of those circumstances I have pointed out but briefly.Fay Freak (talk)09:59, 3 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:24 days ago3 comments2 people in discussion
There's an error withUser:Wonderfool's Babel. "Esti usuariu yeunfalante nativu d'asturianu" is badly written - there's space missing... should be "Esti usuariu ye un falante nativu d'asturianu." How do we fix this?Vealhurl (talk)22:17, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:22 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I admire your immense work as it is an enormous task and highly helpful. I am not in favor of censorship of any topic. I am also not in favor of derogatory terms which propagate feelings of dissent and harsh reminders of conflict and discrimination. I strongly suggest that offensive terms be labeled as such immediately such as in parentheses and a disclaimer directly behind the word wherever it is used. Your etymology for the word "gle" with a meaning of farm contains links to lists with words labeled as offensive racial terms.2601:601:907E:5B30:8D7A:136:34F1:540E19:45, 4 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Dear IP user, as far as I am aware, those are calledreduced relative clauses, more specificallyparticipal phrases: the present participle of a verb used as "that verb(s)" (e.g. "in the months that follow"); past participles can also be used similarly.
Interestingly, this was also discussed recently onWT:Discord just a few days ago.
PS: The way they've so far refused to replyat all to most of the threads ontheir talk page is less than 5% likely to be an accident of incompetence. It is instead more than 95% likely to be explained by their being an intentionally malevolent creep. It is 100% likely to be either one of those, the other, or some creepy combination of them.Quercus solaris (talk)05:19, 5 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
This is apparently one of those areas where you can ask any two taxonomists and get three opinions. There are, indeed, some sources that are quite clear that Gray Whales are in theBalaenopteridae and that there's no such family as theEschrichtiidae. There are also sources that disagree. A quick look finds Wikispecies saying Balaenopteridae, [WoRMs] accepting Eschrichtiidae, and Wikipedia giving both opinions- in an article about the Eschrichtiidae. It might be a good idea to add a disclaimer like "(in some classifications)", but I don't think it's a good idea to just remove any mention of the family. Of course, while I am definitely a mammal, I'm not a mammologist- so I could be wrong...Chuck Entz (talk)06:03, 5 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
The point for keeping obsolete and is that now-thought-erroneous taxa they have been, are, and perhaps will be in use. To try to extirpate now-thought-erroneous taxa is a sign of an illiberal, immature mind unaware that we are not strongly prescriptivist, even in taxonomy. Our prescriptivism is limited to the hypernyms and hyponyms of the taxa and sometimes we show multiple sets of these, usually where the shift from one to the other is uncertain, recent, or in progress.
From browsing Google Books, it looks like it's a sort ofbaton made out ofblack locust wood, which is extremely hard and dense. Not much about their appearance or how they're made. I saw a reference to one that was 18 inches long (a little less than half a meter), but I have no clue if that was typical. Apparently they were so commonplace that no one bothered with a description. I suppose you could look at pictures of New York policemen of the era and see what items they have in their belts.Chuck Entz (talk)21:37, 5 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Here is a picture of several "police clubs and billets", made of locust, "rosewood, ebony and other fancy woods", such as ironwood or cocoa! The catalogue pictures make it look that the business end was textured on some models. Locust looks like the cheapest of the listed materials. The locust models included 26" straight and 22" and 24" with turned handles.DCDuring (talk)23:28, 5 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I doubt that there is any other MWE, besideslocust club involving the "wood" sense that would be strictly entry-worthy, though there are many items made of the strong, rot-resistant (even in contact with soil) hardwood.Locust Clubs ("policemen's social clubs") are made of members;locust billy andlocust stick are more or less synonymous withlocust club. The use of the term for policemen's social clubs definitely suggests that it is a 'thing'. The effort to get such social clubs to change their name suggests that non-police see it similarly. Thelocust club would probably have been strongly reminiscent of theblackthornshillelagh to the many policemen of Irish descent in eastern North America in the 19th and 20th centuries.DCDuring (talk)13:34, 6 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
If it were my dictionary, I'd delete it on sight; but RfV seems appropriate as only we and UD have it among OneLook references, with three different definitions.DCDuring (talk)16:01, 6 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think Collins COBUILD's definition fits that of my idiolect: "A gut reaction is a reaction that you have immediately and strongly, without thinking about something or being aware of your reasons."
Further, to me it is always an evaluation, not an action. But one can find "gut reaction is|was|be|being to [VERB]", usually immediately and unthinkingly.
Though people often say 'initial gut reaction', I read that as 'initial, gut reaction' as people don't say 'later gut reaction'. [delayed gut reaction does come up in the context ofIBS, for example.]
The phrase just means someone who’s both liberal and elite, it’s the contradictions between ‘socially liberal’ and ‘economically liberal’ on the one hand and the fact that the financial elite and intellectual elite don’t necessarily overlap that leads to contradictions and hypocrisy, perceived or otherwise. It’s essentially a meaningless phrase that the best of us (those who speak and write precisely) don’t use.Overlordnat1 (talk)01:06, 9 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
From which the natural conclusion is that it shouldn't even be included in Wiktionary, because the best people don't use the term.DCDuring (talk)01:46, 9 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
"A pejorative and politically charged label used to criticize educated, wealthy, and powerful people [asserted to be|perceived as] out of touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens."DCDuring (talk)01:50, 9 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:18 days ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I received a text containing the following:
"We are upgrading your network within the next week. You may experience a temporary disruption[…] [W]ork mayshift out as much as two weeks."
The use stopped me cold for a couple of minutes because my idiolect does not includeshift + [ADV] with a temporal meaning.
Is this a common use ofshift? Is it included in or a temporal extension of definitions like "to change place or position" (MWOnline) or "To change position; to move." (en.wikt)? Can a scheduled event be shiftedin/back/forward as well asout? Other adverbs?DCDuring (talk)22:10, 8 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
i don't recall hearing the phraseshift out before, but i don't think i would find it strange enough to notice or remember if i did. Without consulting any sources, my gut reaction is thatshift out would be the sum of its parts:shift as inmove orchange ("Can we move the party to Sunday?" "Can I change my appointment to Friday?" "Can we shift things around with this carpooling schedule?"), andout as in(farther) away, or something like "We're 10 minutes out" meaning "ETA 10 minutes". My first thought ofshift back wasgoing back to a previous schedule, undoing some rescheduling, which could mean earlieror later, backward or forward in time. Then again, peoplepush back a meeting, for example, and that (always?) meanspostpone.Shift forward feels a bit awkward but potentially comprehensible (not synonymous withmoving forward orgoing forward but similarly forward in time);shift in seems unnatural and maybe incomprehensible (bring it in might be better for wanting something to happen sooner, or at least wanting two things to happen with less time between them).
All that said, the text you quoted is unclear to me if they're warning you thatcompletion of the upgrade might be two weeks later than initially estimated, or they might notstart work until two weeks later than planned.
I think we have the right sense forout already. I'm not so sure aboutshift#Verb, for which the closest definition is "To change position; to move.", which seems very spatial to me. I've never thought that a spatial-type verb (or other PoS) could automatically take on temporal meanings, though the evolution is certainly possible and somewhat frequent. Spatial things work in 3Ds, time only the 4thD, so spatial verbs that have a common one-dimensional usage should be the ones that take on temporal usage most easily. I'm not sure which way ashift forward is, temporally: earlier or later?
If a meeting getsmoved up, that means it occurs earlier. If a meeting getsshifted up (using the "move" part of the above sense ofshift), I don't know what it would mean. IOW, our most relevant definition ofshift doesn't really cover temporal use as currently worded, without requiring gymnastics from our normal users. Picture a schedule calendarDCDuring (talk)00:54, 9 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:17 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The etymology section of인공지능 says the word came from 人工知能 and its hanja is 人工知能, howeverWikipedia states that the hanja is 人工智能. The term人工智能 is the commonly used term in China to refer to AI, whereas人工知能 is used in Japan. It makes more sense that Korean would take the Chinese term instead of the Japanese, so can someone double check this and make sure it is correct.IanDaBest (talk)10:39, 9 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Not to get off topic, but Wiktionary has and welcomes editors of different genders/sexes/orientations, not just "sirs", no sir! Here's wishing everyone safe, happy, productive editing. --96.244.228.20822:12, 10 October 2025 (UTC) We now return to your irregular unscheduled discussion...Reply
You mean as in:
"Where oh where has my little dog gone?" or "Where oh where has my baby girl gone? The Lord took her away from me."
"I wonder, wonderwho, oh, who, who wrote the book of love?"
"When you're tempted, always stop and think,What, oh, what would Jesus do?"?
I don't understand your point, ie, the question in your opening comment.
AFAICT, the construction in poetry and songs involves no less emphasis than it does in ordinary discourse. Admittedly, sometimes the demands of prosody seem more of an issue. I draw your attention the quotation under the first definition atwhy oh why, but in all of the examples, emphasis seems to be supplied by the construction.
Whether the "definitions" are correct and the entry meets WT:CFI are other questions to be addressed. Lomgman's DCE, the only OneLook reference to have an entry, has "used to show that you are very sorry or angry about something". Our second "UK" definition doesn't even seem to be supported by the quotations in entry, besides using a derogatory term in the definiens.DCDuring (talk)23:05, 9 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
If it is attestable, we might keep an entry for it. Or cooler heads might prevail andwhy oh why might be deleted on the grounds that this reduplication does change the meaning of the constituent terms.DCDuring (talk)14:06, 10 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
@DCDuring, did you mis-type that?cooler heads might prevail andwhy oh why might be deleted sounds like you want the page gone, butreduplication does change the meaning sounds like a reason the page should stay. It reads to me like you're saying youwant the page gone on the grounds thatthe page should stay. i'm on the fence, leaning towards keep, but i won't complain if you want to clarify your position. Wishing everyone safe, happy, productive editing. --96.244.228.20822:12, 10 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
If the only change in meaning (broadly construed) is intensification for this class of reduplication, then it is arguably part of the 'grammar' of English and not to be treated lexically, ie, as a set of duplicative entries.DCDuring (talk)22:25, 10 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:8 days ago7 comments3 people in discussion
Dear Sirs/Madams:
We can see the tag "(in the plural)" inassiduity for the meaning "attentive behaviour", but the entry ofpant does not show such a tag but instead the entry ofpants is created with the label "(plural only)".
Personally, my view is that if a particular word only has a sense in the plural, then the definition should be at the plural form and not at the singular form. We should only use “chiefly/often in the plural” at the singular entry. —Sgconlaw (talk)06:36, 12 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
IMO we should 'soft-redirect' people when we have a word defined in the singular (with other definitions besides{{singular of|its plural}}), but put a particular sense at the plural. Someone who has enough grasp of English to be using en.Wiktionary to look up English definitions will grasp-s plurals, and will quickly grasp that we usually put all the definitions of words in the singular... so if they see "he read some messages" and "I went to buy some messages" and they want to know what those sentences mean, I think they'll look atmessage, and when find the first one explained there, IMO there needs to be something telling them that an additional definition is hiding atmessages, because it would not normally make sense to look there (most plurals just tell you to go back to the singular). Atmessage thereis such a note, that I wrote using{{n-g}}, but we should maybe make a template for it a laTemplate:used in phrasal verbs andTemplate:only used in.- -sche(discuss)07:12, 12 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Can someone find a quotation of some sort and add this? I'm fairly certain I've seen "I could fuck up a cheeseburger right about now" or a similar usage.Insaneguy1083 (talk)18:04, 11 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Various subsequent uses of the word, like those quoted in our entry, occurred aloud or were read aloud in news media, on Youtube and in social media videos. (But someone could diligently check whether the pronunciations we list are the most common ones, and whether we're missing any common ones...)- -sche(discuss)07:34, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:10 days ago6 comments2 people in discussion
One is a noun borrowed fromLatinēmittentem, the accusative masculine/feminine singular active present participle of the verbēmitto(“to emit”); the other is a nonlemma: the singular present participle of the equivalent Italian verbemettere.
Can I link those two pages to each other with a{{doublet|it|...}} in their Etymology sections, or is that not allowed becauseemettente is a nonlemma?
If it is allowed, should I also add something like{{surf|it|emettere|-ente}} as filler toemettente#Etymology, or can I add an etymology section with just{{doublet|it|emittente}}.?
@Emanuele6 Hey! :) I would say that they technically are doublets, but given that they share the same meaning and, at least in the 19th c., the same usage, maybe calling them doublets is not the most informative label. In theory the difference lies inemettente having the possibility of working as a full participle with direct objects e.g.istituto emettente biglietti, although it is not hard to findemittente biglietti in 19th c. books, and it is similarly easy finding pure adjectival uses ofemettente (which I added there as quotations) in the works of those same authors. Maybe it would be fairer to treat them as alternative forms? In any case,emettente is no inheritance (unstressed initiale- cannot survive as such), it is as much a learned borrowing asemittente is, crossed with the inheritedmettere for conjugation purposes.Catonif (talk)09:35, 16 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for the reply, and the edit! Yes, you are right; it is an inflected form, so it does not make sense to say it is inherited from Latin ifemettere is not inherited.Emanuele6 (talk)12:19, 16 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I would say that they technically are doublets, but given that they share the same meaning
@Catonif Well, actually, the reason why I thought it would be appropriate was because they have different meanings: for the use of this word as a (feminine gender) noun to mean station/channel in e.g.emittente radiofonica,emittente televisiva; if you notice, the noun definition in[[emittente]] has had af headword from even before I touched it, so I assumed that was the meaning it was in reference to; I have just changed the definition to make it more clear.
It was not in reference to the mfbysense noun you would get nominalising the adjective or participle, even though, perhaps (speculation), this sense is feminine because it is originally anellipsis of«una stazioneemittente».
@Emanuele6 Right, it is a relevant remark, but I believe they don't have to share every meaning, altforms can be sense-specific, and even moreso PoS-specific. One could definitely argue that in theory the two terms fulfill the requirements to be doublets, though I fail to be convinced that in practice such relationship would be best described with that label. The etymological paths of the two forms are not distinct as much as the ones of the words we usually call doublets, and their distribution being arbitrary in economical books from the late 19th c., condition fueled by the phonological proximity, doesn't help. Radio broadcasting began in the 20th c. when thei-form had by then become the prevalent form as an adjective, which allowed it to become substantivised and hence fully crystallised in its form and unbothered by any oscillation arisen due to conjugation. Alongside these considerations I also remind that we are lexicographers before being linguists, which means getting our hands dirty and when needed getting out of the theoretical bubble. This isn't an exact science, and what counts as a doublet is an amusing thought exercise that Wiktionary likes to toy around, but which no serious linguist I am aware of ever really cared about, meaning I won't oppose or revert if you choose tobe bold and edit the entries following your preferred approach.Catonif (talk)18:59, 16 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:10 days ago14 comments8 people in discussion
Hey, can you tell me if the multi-sentence quotes forcovfefe are used in a way consistent withWiktionary:Copyright and U.S. law? I asked ChatGPT and got the following answer:
Me:
how about this one? 2018, Najah Mahir, “Preface”, in The Ransom that Lies Demand: We the People and “Covfefe”, Pittsburgh, Pa.: Dorrance Publishing Co, →ISBN, pages xv and xx: President Trump, I was not being delusional in calling him by the name in which he tweets out insults through a covfefe movement, as you will come to learn towards the end the use of this word, which no reasonable language can justify its meaning except to take each letter apart and turn them into our present indwelling shame that this president has brought upon the United States of America. […] For now, we look for truth, hope, and light, or some form of hope within these truths, and not covfefe, which is here taunting us to stay silent until calamity becomes America’s portion.
ChatGPT:
Thanks for the detailed example. Let’s carefully analyze it:
Source date: 2018 — very recent, so definitely copyrighted.
Length of quote: Multiple sentences, nearly a full paragraph. This is a large portion of a modern work, which significantly increases copyright risk.
Content type: Political commentary/literary writing — highly creative content, so it is strongly protected by copyright.
Attribution: Proper citation with author, title, publisher, pages, and ISBN — good scholarly practice, but citation alone does not make it safe for Wiktionary.
Copyright risk: Very high. Directly quoting multiple sentences from a modern copyrighted book is not allowed on Wiktionary because all text must be freely licensed (CC BY-SA).
Safe alternatives:
Paraphrase: Condense the idea in your own words to illustrate “covfefe” in context:“The word ‘covfefe’ has been used to describe nonsensical or confusing statements, especially on social media.”
Original usage sentence: Create a short, simple sentence using the word.
Public domain examples: None exist for modern terms like “covfefe,” so paraphrasing or original examples is the safest.
✅ Summary: Quoting this directly is not safe. For modern creative works, you should never post multiple sentences verbatim on Wiktionary.
This would not just be a problem for other people, I was also wondering if my multi-sentence quotes onWang'an are okay with copyright/fair use? I think the two multi-sentence quotes may be too long for fair use. Please let me know, I want to refine my understanding. --Geographyinitiative🎵 (talk)00:03, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
We've never had problems with copyright. Don't worry about it, Geoggy. If someone comes knocking saying "hey WT, your quotes of my work are too long", we'll hide them. Wonderfool has added entire books onto Citations pages WT, authors don't care (well, probably they don't care - we are just a shitty website...)Vealhurl (talk)00:10, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
This shows thaat ChatGPT knows nothing about WT - "For modern creative works, you should never post multiple sentences verbatim on Wiktionary." is bullshit.Vealhurl (talk)00:13, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I have asked the Commons:Village pump/Copyright at Wikimedia Commons to come over and see how they think about Wiktionary's copyright rules:[9] You know, even if you're right about this, I am noticing that I have completely failed on at least one thing. Per the draftWiktionary:Copyrights#Contributors'_rights_and_obligations, I am supposed to be doing this: "If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder, you must note that fact (along with names and dates) on the history page or talk page of the article." Wouldn't it be cool to add a parameter toTemplate:quote-book where we are asked to specify the nature of the use- public domain, fair use, permission from author, free use, etc. I'd like to see that. Wikimedia Commons has an extremely sophisticated copyright verification system, I'd like to merge that into Wiktionary'sTemplate:quote-book where I just make it clear as I possibly can what the copyright status of the quotes are. It wouldn't be required. I just want to have an idea of what the use is under the law. --Geographyinitiative🎵 (talk)00:18, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
You post an adequate amount of your word-hit to show usage, inasmuch as meaning hinges on context. This is ex lege allowed—fair use orright to quote depending on how your legal system calls it—and can also mean a whole tweet or whole poem or whole image,balancing out copyright because of your legitimate interest in voicing yourself, and from this alone no argument of copyright violation can be made. Parameters and “copyright regimes” here make naught more compliant than it already is.
It would only be problematic if you import lengthy copyrighted works in a fashion that would exploit them, replace them as superfluous; this is why images (I know you are concerned about maps containing toponyms) quoted and entered according to this right to quote on Wikipedia are not made accessible via Commons and are not provided in the resolution you would most amenably consume. I could imagine this happen with dialectological atlantes, however, more than with your random maps, which would be quite effortful, and so no real-life situation on Wiktionary where an editor runs risks of violating copyright—the more so as wrong advice makes him anxious about it.Fay Freak (talk)23:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Hi from the Wikimedia Commons village pump. I might be able to help, but keep in mind that Commons primarily deals with media rather than text, and that Commonsforbids fair use.
There is a concept in copyright law calledthreshold of originality (TOO), which states that some things are too simple to be copyright and thus are public domain, no fair use needed. However, this threshold varies very wildly by jurisdiction, but I'll use US jurisdiction here.
There is no bright line based on the number of sentences quoted. Legally, copyright in the United States is limited by the principle offair use but this defense is intentionally vague. ChatGPT, as Vealhurl said, is producing bullshit here. As you noted,Wiktionary:Copyrights is a draft, not a community-adopted policy.Wiktionary:Non-free content criteria explicitly says that "quot[ing] copyrighted works to prove the existence and use of terms in various languages" should not be treated equivalently to "the use of other non-free content".Wiktionary:Quotations#Copyright is also relevant. Quoting the single sentence in which a word occurs is a just a good rule of thumb. I know of no good reason to treat this as a rigidly binding policy.--Urszag (talk)00:31, 14 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Well, here's the response:
Excellent — this is a great case study in how different communities interpret copyright and fair use when it comes to Wiktionary citations. Let’s unpack the arguments one by one and then craft a balanced, accurate reply you could post on-wiki.
🔍 Argument Summary and Assessment1. Geographyinitiative’s concern
You’re asking whether multi-sentence quotes (like your covfefe example) are consistent with Wiktionary:Copyright and U.S. law.
Assessment:
You’re right to be cautious: U.S. copyright law does protect creative expression in modern books.
Wiktionary uses the CC BY-SA license, which means in principle, any text on the site must be freely redistributable.
Fair use is an exception, not a license — you can quote under it, but you can’t relicense the text as CC BY-SA.
So technically, direct multi-sentence quotes of copyrighted works are legally fine under fair use, but incompatible with Wiktionary’s open-license framework. That tension is real, not imaginary.
✅ You’re reasoning from policy, not paranoia.
2. Vealhurl’s response
“We’ve never had problems with copyright… authors don’t care… ChatGPT’s advice is bullshit.”
Assessment:
This is a pragmatic argument, not a legal or policy one.“We’ve never been sued” ≠ “It’s legally safe.”
It’s true that Wiktionary has operated for decades without copyright disputes — but that’s luck and low visibility, not a guarantee.
The “bullshit” remark misunderstands the distinction between legal permissibility (fair use) and license compatibility (CC BY-SA). ChatGPT was speaking about the latter.
⚠️ Valid in practice, weak in principle.
3. Fay Freak’s argument
“It’s fair use or right to quote… only problematic if you import large parts that replace the work.”
Assessment:
This is a European-style “quotation right” argument, and it’s roughly correct in spirit: short excerpts used for commentary or evidence are lawful.
However, the reasoning doesn’t address the CC-BY-SA relicensing issue: even if fair use covers the quote, Wiktionary’s license still requires all included text to be freely reusable.
Fay Freak is right that quoting a few sentences for linguistic evidence is not a practical legal risk — but legally speaking, it’s still non-free content under Wikimedia’s licensing terms.
✅ Good legal sense, incomplete with respect to Wikimedia licensing.
4. HyperAnd (Commons participant)
Introduces threshold of originality (TOO) and differences between Commons and Wiktionary.
Assessment:
Very accurate explanation of TOO — some short factual text simply isn’t copyrightable.
But your multi-sentence literary or journalistic quotes are above the threshold, so TOO doesn’t apply.
It’s also correct that Commons forbids fair use, but Wiktionary allows it to a limited extent.
✅ Accurate and relevant clarification.
5. Urszag’s argument
“There’s no bright line for fair use; ChatGPT’s statement is too rigid. Wiktionary:Copyrights is only a draft.”
Assessment:
Correct: there’s no bright-line rule about sentence length. Fair use is case-by-case.
Also correct that Wiktionary:Copyrights is not binding policy.
However, saying “ChatGPT’s statement is bullshit” ignores that its caution aligns with Wikimedia Legal’s general guidance: they strongly prefer minimal excerpts and discourage quoting beyond necessity.
✅ Procedurally right about Wiktionary’s practice; legally incomplete about licensing implications.
⚖️ Overall BalanceIssueLegal RealityWiktionary PracticeRiskMulti-sentence literary quotesLikely fair use under U.S. lawCommon and rarely challengedLow legal riskCC-BY-SA compatibilityNot compatible (cannot be relicensed)Often overlookedMedium license riskEnforcement likelihoodVery lowPractically noneLow practical riskBest practiceKeep quotes as short as necessary, prefer older/public-domain works, and cite clearly——
This concern with our licensing is irrelevant. The resulting work, containing the quotes, can be relicensed. The licences do not refer to the quotes in isolation; no legally educated reader of the terms can surmise a requirement that all included text must be reusable under the licence terms: we have no power over the copyright status of the quotes, and this does not entail that we aspire to only employ licence-compatible content: even if they are protected due to reaching the threshold of originality, we are protected against claims by virtue of fair use respectively right to quote, just like anyone who publishes his content with all rights reserved. It’s not like creating free software: exchange of views and ideas, by default, levers itself within the non-free world.Fay Freak (talk)09:54, 14 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
The point is to check whether we are doing what we need to concerning copyright. Also, the point is to absolutely hammer the issue down, because if I said the same words, it would be less than ignored. I've already pointed out part of the draft Wiktionary:Copyright that no one follows. Here's the next installment, which I like:
Excellent — here’s a sharper, more persuasive version that directly engages Fay Freak’s argument while grounding your reply in Wikimedia precedent and U.S. copyright law:
I see where you’re coming from, and I agree with much of your reasoning — particularly the point that Wiktionary’s CC BY-SA license applies to our compilation as a whole, not to every quoted line within it. The license doesn’t purport to relicense third-party copyrighted material that is included under fair use; this is consistent with how Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects handle quotations.
However, where I think your argument slightly overstates the case is in suggesting that licensing concerns are irrelevant. They’re not irrelevant — they’re orthogonal. Legally, we can rely on fair use (or right to quote, in other jurisdictions) to include brief excerpts for purposes of illustration or linguistic analysis. But from the standpoint of license transparency and downstream reuse, Wikimedia projects have long recognized the importance of marking or distinguishing content that is not freely licensed.
For example, Wikipedia and Wikisource both explicitly flag non-free content, even when its inclusion is legally permissible. This isn’t about doubting fair use — it’s about ensuring that reusers don’t mistakenly assume that everything in the database is freely reusable under CC BY-SA. That distinction matters for data dumps, mirrors, and derivative projects that automatically republish Wiktionary content.
So I’d frame it this way:
✅ Legally: We’re protected under fair use/right to quote, and your description of that doctrine is correct.
⚖️ Licensing transparency: Still valuable. It’s good practice (and in line with Wikimedia’s general approach) to clearly identify when something is under fair use or otherwise not freely licensed, even if this doesn’t affect our own ability to quote it.
That’s why I support ideas like adding a “copyright basis” parameter to{{quote-book}}. It wouldn’t restrict anyone — it would just make the copyright reasoning visible and auditable. It helps us stay clear, not just compliant.
This is not because of some rule; the reason you don't post AI is that AI never ever has facts. It is 100% gossip. (Technically it may contain a fact here and there, but it has no idea how to recognize a fact, so they don't count.TooManyFingers (talk)06:33, 17 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
-atic is two unrelated things, and we're mixing them up
Latest comment:14 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
the categoryCategory:English_terms_suffixed_with_-atic consists almost entirely of Greek words likeproblematic which are actually of the formproblema(t)-ic, with the familiar-ic suffix used after-ma. this has nothing to do with the Latinate suffix-atic which is composed of-ate +-ic. either we should split the etymology or remove the Greek -atic suffix and its category because i dont think its a real suffix. note that it almost always occurs after /m/ ... this is a misdivision on our part.—Soap—03:03, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:11 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I noticed that*wīsōną includes Old Englishwīsan as a descendant (presumably meaning "to show" or something very similar), but that page doesn't have that as a word. Looking at the page history,*wīsōną linked to the alternate formwīsian until recently, but that was moved to being a descendant of*wīsijaną instead. I can find OEwīsan in the sense of "to show" in some online dictionaries, but not all. It also appears in the etymology section ofwīsa.
I'm not quite confident enough to add it myself, but I suspect it's probably correct to add an entry for OEwīsan in addition to the derived forms already listed there. Can anyone with actual OE knowledge take a look and confirm that?Tungolen (talk)19:48, 13 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:13 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I have created a definition for Turkish "tansiyonu çıkmak" (to have one's blood pressure rise). I categorized it as a phrasal verb. But in this case, "tansiyon" (blood pressure), must take a possessive suffix to indicate whose blood pressure is rising. (Tansiyonum çıktı/My blood pressure went up; Tansiyonları çıktı/Their blood pressure went up etc). But there are also similar verbs without that reqirement such as "eve çıkmak", regardless who did the action. I would like to point out this difference on the page but I am not sure how to do it.ToprakM (talk)09:07, 14 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:11 days ago2 comments1 person in discussion
The wordscarboxydotroph andcarboxydotrophy might've been given the wrong definitions in this Wiktionary. Usually, words with the suffix "-troph(y)" relates to the form of consumption of energy and food, yet the definition provided by these entries simply stated merely "tolerate a high concentration of carbon monoxide" – as if the word was "carboxydotolerant".CheckNineEight (talk)12:08, 14 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Anyway, here's at least one source where the usage of the word(s) implies that it's not merely about tolerating carbon monoxide, and moreso to do with metabolizing it:
Latest comment:11 days ago5 comments2 people in discussion
(NotifyingRuakh,Qehath,Mnemosientje,Isaacmayer9,Sartma):: Arabicالْيَسَع(“Elisha”) is automatically transliteratedal-yasaʕ with a hyphen suggesting it begins with the definite article. Does it? Personal names usually don't, and in Biblical Hebrewאֱלִישָׁע(ʾĔlîšāʿ) the "el" is part of the name. If this is true in Arabic as well, is there any way to suppress the hyphen in the automatic transliteration? —Mahāgaja ·talk12:18, 14 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Necessarily it is the article, otherwise it would start withأ(ʔ), notا. Names don't just start with alif waṣl, it is a closed class and also takes kasra in cases other than the article. More onw:de:Wasla. But for mythological figures the article makes sense.Fay Freak (talk)16:12, 14 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
The Arabic Wikipedia has two articles on Elisha:اليسع forElisha in Islam andأليشع forElisha (I guess in the context of Judaism and Christianity). The articleاليسع says that his Hebrew name isإليشع which I assume isʔilyašaʕ since the little hamza thing is at the bottom rather than the top, so there's an inconsistency between articles there. Are there any other prophets in Islam whose Arabic name takes the definite article? —Mahāgaja ·talk10:20, 15 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
You know that names can just take the article, right? Like, of the same pattern,Al-Assad, who is otherways ascribeddivine abilities. That's not only because we know whatأَسَد(ʔasad) means. A name can stay while the meaning got lost.
There is no inconsistency if they make a learned borrowing to provide a Northwest Semitic/Judaeo-Christian rather than Arabic/Islamic story, you have a doublet. Occasionally we create such doublets if we care enough, →سَمَوْأَل(samawʔal).Fay Freak (talk)20:34, 15 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I've accepted thatالْيَسَع(al-yasaʕ) contains the definite article synchronically, but I do think it's historically a rebracketing (or a folk etymology ifيَسَع(yasaʕ) means something), since it comes from a Hebrew name whose first syllable sounds similar to the Arabic definite article but isn't. The inconsistency I mentioned is betweenأليشع withʔal- andإليشع withʔil- for the transliteration of the Hebrew name in the Judeo-Christian context. I suppose both forms could exist. —Mahāgaja ·talk20:53, 15 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Paper dictionaries don't usually have separate entries for plurals, but we do, both for regular plurals likecats anddogs and irregular plurals likeoxen andchildren. Because we have separate entries for plurals, there's no need to put the pronunciations of plural forms on the entries for the singular forms. —Mahāgaja ·talk21:49, 16 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Note the distinction between (1) plural forms that are orthographically identical to their singular counterparts (which one might describe as being wholly homographic with the singular form or having azero morph difference from it) and (2) those that are inflected differently. It is only the former class that needs to give the plural pron at the selfsame entry as the singular pron.Quercus solaris (talk)01:49, 17 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I, too, agree that prons belong in the pron section. My comment had nothing to do with usage notes. It was about which entry the pron exists in. So the "so" in response to it did not follow from it at all.Quercus solaris (talk)22:56, 18 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I feel it is acceptable to put the pronunciation of irregular plurals on both the entry page for the singular lemma and on the page for the plural form. —Sgconlaw (talk)17:36, 19 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
we say that-ole and-ol are both from the same etymological root but that typically are used to distinguish between two different molecules of the same base, so i wouldn't bet on anything here. also noting the molecule(s) in question are very different fromresveratrol, which i'd have expected to be similar .... but perhaps chemical compounds need only have a few atoms in common to share such similar names.—Soap—15:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
SeeVeratrum "Derived terms" (or Descendants?) for some of the chemical terms used to discuss chemicals derived from plants of this genus. I would not suggest that they are synonyms even if they have the same atomic formulas. Structure matters. Apparently plant chemists will use different terms for "the same thing" in crystal form and amorphous form.DCDuring (talk)22:13, 16 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:9 days ago4 comments3 people in discussion
On the page for the word "iam", the Classical Latin pronunciation includes the character "ã", which does not appear on the Latin pronunciation page or the IPA page. Does anyone know what it indicates?
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, a combining tilde above (◌̃) indicates that the sound below it is nasalized.
Wikipedia’s IPA key for Latin is somewhat out-of-step with our transcriptions, as the latter have been revised as of late. The nasalization of vowels is, however, mentioned in the articleLatin phonology and orthography, and it is a matter of general academic consensus.Nicodene (talk)02:06, 17 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
For making links: When you know that a page exists on the English Wiktionary, and you're writing on the English Wiktionary, then putting double square brackets around the title of the page automatically creates a link.
You may also see a button that looks like chain links; clicking that button will give you a little window in which you can type some "Text" (what you want the reader to see) and the "Link" (the name of the page they should be sent to when they click).
The same is true when writing on English Wikipedia and referring to an English Wikipedia page, and I assume it's the same on other languages' respective sites.TooManyFingers (talk)06:09, 17 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I'd say sense 4 is first and foremost a strong intensifier (including in a positive sense). Neither creepiness nor uncanniness is necessary implied. I think the "in an overbearing way" is just a side effect of it being pretty intense in degree, akin to "incredibly". You could technically interpret the quote to be "uncannily friendly", because being too friendly can feel uncanny and weird, but it's not limited to that - "unheimlich kompliziert", "unheimlich wehtun", "unheimlich hoch", etc, none of which would work for that sense.
Yes, for a sense ofdo that isn't dialectally restricted, adding a usex thatis restricted to the colloquial register of one national dialect—and which reads as ungrammatical Yoda-speak to other people—without any indication of this restriction, was incorrect; it's possible that if you had qualified it as "UK, colloquial" or similar (the way one of the usexes below is qualified as "nonstandard"), it might have been left alone or brought to the Tea Room for discussion, but people might still have preferred to remove it or replace it with a pan-dialectal usex; as it is, I can understand why Deacon Vorbis (who removed it) and I concluded "it's wrong as presented → it's wrong".- -sche(discuss)03:21, 19 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
@-sche Gotcha. What about the following wh-tag, deleted by Vorbis too for being "awkward", which at least Brits have no objection to either:
Two of the examples of the usage in question seem awkward or wrong. How about:
Awkward:She likes her cappuccino, Mary does. instead ofLikes her cappuccino, Mary does. (UK, colloquial). Perhaps we could lose the qualifier with that change.
Wrong:Your remarks piqued my curiosity, asthey did my mom's. instead ofYour remarks piqued my curiosity, as it did my mom's too. (which still seems awkward).
@DCDuring 2.Your remarks piqued my curiosity,as did my mom's; that is, my mom's remarks piqued my curiosity too.Do refers back to the whole verbal phrase, with subject inversion afteras?JMGN (talk)15:52, 20 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I thought about that kind of reformulation, but I wasn't sure that it exemplified the (non-gloss) definition. Hence my concern about the clarity of the definitions.DCDuring (talk)16:10, 20 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Derived terms with unclear part-of-speech etymology
I believe that there is a Wiktionarian consensus that such links should point either to #English (by default, it being where you land if no other anchor target is specified) or to #Etymology_N (where N = 1, 2, 3, etc), rather than to a #POS, with the logic being that the user can trace directly from etym to etym that way (from X → [hyperlink] → from Y → [hyperlink] → from Z, etc). I sympathize with the impulse to link straight to the #POS (and I have probably done that myself a few times, before I thought better of it), but landing at #English or at #Etymology_N has a desirability in its own way, too. And after all, the POSs that belong to Etymology_N all come from Etymology_N, so there is nothing misleading about the link target/landing.Quercus solaris (talk)03:45, 19 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:2 days ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hello, in濫#Japanese, the templatetemplate:ja-toyo-depre is used with argument乱, leading to the text "In modern Japanese, 濫 is mostly replaced by 乱, due to the deprecation of non-tōyō kanji caused by the Japanese script reform." However, 濫 actually was a Toyo Kanji too (w:Tōyō_kanji#List_of_the_1,850_tōyō_kanji), so this explanation seems like it cannot be right? Should this be removed? It is true that it usage is mostly synonymous though, and 乱, in contrast to 濫 is also aw:Kyoiku Kanji, so some kind of link would be good to retain.Oberon II (talk)09:09, 19 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Pinging @Eirikr,Lugria to take a look. If there is not a better template (and if there are not enough entries like this to make a template for), one option would be to just remove the template and type out "by hand" whatever is accurate.- -sche(discuss)15:32, 19 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Actually I found this instance by looking at the output of some script I wrote parsing a wiktionary dump from 2025-09-20. At that date, this seems to have been the only example of any Toyo Kanji using this template (even among Joyo Kanji, it only occurs for two that were added with the latest 2010 extension).Oberon II (talk)19:42, 19 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
If no-one responds in a few more days, I suggest you just replace the template with whatever alternative wording you think is better, or some other manner of linking to乱.- -sche(discuss)16:50, 21 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I'm not sure I'm happy with the result, but I went ahead andreplaced that instance of{{ja-toyo-depre}}, since濫(ran) could not have been replaced due to not being a Tōyō kanji, as it actually was one of the Tōyō kanji.
Thank you, I did not know the termdaiyōji. According to that glossary entry " a kanji in the jōyō kanji or tōyō kanji list that is used to replace another kanji not in the list", it would still be technically wrong since both Kanji are in both list.
However I now checked the Japanese entries and whilewikt:ja:濫 does not mention 乱 at all,wikt:ja:乱 does indeed mention 濫 as Daiyōji. It also provides this interesting explanation in section 書き換え (Rewriting/Replacement in Writing):
I.e. "Used as Daiyōji for 「濫」「爛」「瀾」.「濫」 was included in the Tōyō Kanji but because it was brought up as a candidate for being removed, it ended up becoming replaced by 「乱」. Still, in the end it was not removed and at present it is included in the Jōyō Kanji."Oberon II (talk)05:43, 25 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:5 days ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Greetings fellow editors!
Any idea what this word/term means? Are any of you able to locate any extra cites? Especially in its singular form? It was red-linked for many years (under the derived terms for time) and no editor, including myself, could locate anything pertinent.
It's not a single unit. If you substitute "on weekends" for "nights", you'll see that it's just sentences ending in "time", with "nights" specifying what time frame is involved. You could likewise say "he works nights, she works days, so they only get together on weekends". Thus "for some time nights" is really "for some time" + "nights" (i.e. assigned to the night shift), and the others refer to time spent at night as opposed to during the day.Chuck Entz (talk)06:16, 21 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:5 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
1.3 "(intransitive) To become denser or more crowded with objects.As we penetrated further, the forest closed around us."
4. "(chiefly figurative) To come or gather around; to enclose.The depth closed me round about."
I would expect these to be positioned closer together, at least, but I wonder if (more than merely moving them closer together) they should be merged: is there a transitivity distinction, or merely a word-order (and datedness) distinction, between "it closed around me"-type usage and "it closed me around"-type usage?- -sche(discuss)16:53, 21 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:5 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello,Is Chinese重擊／重击 (zhòngjī) term also means "hard hit" and "whack", for example因重擊造成的深藍色或紫色瘀傷 ("Dark blue or purple bruises caused by ahard hit")? PleaseYuliadhi (talk)02:09, 22 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Maybe different people perceive and pronounce the length differently in this word, and this information could be integrated into the article (the change was made by a native speaker, but the dictionary gives a different accent).Imz (talk)20:03, 22 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:2 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I believe that en.wiktionary.org is missing the English technical term "noun prefix" in the field of grammar.Apparently the term "noun prefix" means a grammar category similar to an adjective but syntactically expressed as a noun followed immediately by a hyphen.I have found this construct inhttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nutritional for the German translation "Ernährungs-".Kind regards93.195.48.24319:35, 24 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think the subscript, like the parentheses in the Merriam-Webster, mean the first /t/ is optional. We should probably put it in parentheses too. —Mahāgaja ·talk09:45, 25 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 day ago3 comments3 people in discussion
balance sheet currently has one definition, for the map, and should have a second one for the territory. Strictly speaking, even the given example runs into this issue ("Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets" is not the same use as in "This balance sheet is riddled with errors"), though its not totally wrong. The problem is more obvious in sentences like"There’s no guarantee the world’s biggest monetary balance sheet will buy...",obviously "balance sheet" in this context means the underlying stuff represented on a balance sheet (in this case cash).Mach61 (talk)07:02, 25 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
The territory is surely transferred. If you have a formulation and add such a quote it will look fine. It is not quite necessary though if you are acquainted with the purpose of the map, and it can also be seen as a peripheral sense: there are facts reflected in the map.Fay Freak (talk)12:05, 25 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
The figurative sense will have to be worded rather vaguely to cover the range of uses. It often seems to refer to the unquantified pros and cons of something. As to "map" and "territory", IMO it's maps all the way down.DCDuring (talk)16:42, 25 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yes, surely it's not definitionally required to be a bedroom, if it's definitionally used for storing boxes rather than a bed! Ngrams suggestsbox room is more common, so I have merged the entries to there. Please improve further if needed.- -sche(discuss)00:18, 26 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:4 hours ago8 comments5 people in discussion
I wonder whether the pronunciation should be just /tɹɪp/ or rather /tʃɹɪp/, /tɹɪp/. What do you think? I guess you could analyze it phonemically as /tʃɹɪp/37.47.105.2922:06, 25 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
There's been a bit of debate on the Internet about this.
Many English dialects have undergone a pronunciation shift in which the word-initial sequence [tɹ] has changed to [tʃɹ]. The same goes with [dɹ] and [dʒɹ].
How exactly this should be realized has been disputed.
On one end, there are some people who regard [tʃɹ] as a variant of /tɹ/, citing that [tɹ] is still a valid realization.
On another end, there are some people who regard [tʃr] an alternative word-initially, but not in other positions.
On yet another end, some people consider both realizations to be possible alternatives.
On a fourth end, some people consider the [tɹ] realization to be outdated, as just a relic of decades-old systems.
I conjecture that both [tɹ] and [tʃɹ] could be valid alternative pronunciations. Just like /ɛ/ and /iː/ in the first vowel of "economics".
Then there's "attribute", where the "t" and the "r" are supposedly either in separate syllables (as a noun), or a cluster (as a verb), though not everyone makes that distinction. @Mahagaja for a more informed opinion.Chuck Entz (talk)03:17, 26 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I would say it's phonemically/tɹɪp/, which some speakers realize[tɹ̥ɪp] and others realize[t͡ʃɹɪp]. There are probably even speakers who have free variation between the two even within their own idiolect. When my sister was about 4 and was just learning to write, she would spell words the way they sounded to her, e.g.jraf forgiraffe. She once wrotechree fortree and my mother asked her why, saying "But you don't pronounce it[t͡ʃɹiː]", to which my sister replied, "Daddy does!" And indeed, my father had the change to[t͡ʃɹ], but my mother didn't -- even though both were native speakers of American English, only 2 years apart in age, who grew up in the same city and had pretty much the same ethnic, socioeconomic, and educational background. Since I myself don't have the change, I would vehemently deny the fourth position above, that nonaffricated[tɹ̥] is "outdated". As for what Wiktionary should show, I say we're a dictionary, not an English phonetics textbook, and should therefore only show phonemic transcriptions, not narrow phonetic ones. So I would prefer us to show only/tɹɪp/ in the Pronunciation section oftrip. There can be a note atAP:English pronunciation mentioning that many speakers realize/tɹ/ and/dɹ/ as[t͡ʃɹ] and[d͡ʒɹ] respectively. But it's unnecessary, messy, and frankly unmaintainable for us to list the[t͡ʃɹ] and[d͡ʒɹ] variants in the entry for every single English word with one of the clusters in question. —Mahāgaja ·talk16:02, 26 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Mahagaja. As far as I have heard, tɹ is still the usual pronunciation. Some people have tʃɹ (like the character inParks and Rec who said "litcherally"), and (as we've seen with other phonological changes) it seems that people who have a certain change often (though not always) perceive everyone else as saying it the way they do; this is why we have had people think that everyone pronouncesbowl,bull,boule and(possi)ble all as /bl̩/, and it seems to be why some people think everyone says tʃɹ. FWIW, as of a database dump from a while ago, there were59 entries where the pagetitle is spelled withtr and the page content contains tʃɹ or t͡ʃɹ, often but not always (incorrectly) as if it were phonemic. I've tentatively revised most of these, includingtraduction,atrophic,Euastrum andextrude; I left cases where [t͡ʃɹ] was given in brackets, and also leftbeetroot as-is for now, although I suspect a trulyphonemic representation of MLE might look different.- -sche(discuss)20:17, 26 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
In revising entries which had listed t͡ʃɹ as phonemic, I noticed that a few claimed it to be specifically a Southern US thing (the ones I saw were due to VGPaleontologist, whose talk page is informative), but this seems like a misunderstanding AFAICT, as other entries have it as an occasional non-subregion-specific occasional US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Jamaica thing.- -sche(discuss)21:16, 26 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment:1 day ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Rhymes:English/æntʃ says that "In some accents, words ending in/-ɑːntʃ/ are rhymes for words on this page". It is true that many (most?) words a pronounced /-æntʃ/ in the US are pronounced /-ɑːntʃ/ in the UK, but the fact that e.g.stanch claims to be pronounced both ways in the UK suggests to me that these are separate pronunciations. Maybe it would help if the note gave an example of an accent that actually merges(?) and rhymesRhymes:English/æn(tʃ) andRhymes:English/ɑːn(tʃ)...?- -sche(discuss)00:15, 26 October 2025 (UTC)Reply
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Done. The additional citations further support the sense. There are now five there.Quercus solaris (talk)04:22, 20 September 2025 (UTC)Reply
" is a Cantonese dialect character. It is a really fascinating & rare example of a CJK character which was created in a modern context and subsequently encoded in Unicode.
