Talk:decrepid

I hear the word 'Decrepid' used a lot in Leicestershire, England where I grew up82.151.232.181 10:16, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

"decrepid" is not an obsolete word
It struck me as strange when I was looking for synonyms for decrepid and found this entry saying it was an obsolete form of decrepit. In my experience decrepid is in use and none of my friends or relatives would spell it with a "t". That sounds like a Scots version of the word - like, happit, tappit, skelpit...


 * Take a look at a book search and you will see that most books using this spelling are centuries old. Equinox ◑ 20:03, 13 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I have just met someone who was from Norfolk originally, and who insists that the 'd' spelling is normal there, or was as recently as her last visit within the last 15 years. It's not just about books! 220.253.14.20 00:33, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
 * If we have three different people attesting to the word's current use in at least two regions of England, versus one saying that only old books use it... is that a strong enough case to remove the "Obsolete" label? 220.253.14.20 00:37, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Sadly, not yet, because we can't put one unknown person's word about what another unknown person thought was the case 15 years ago in one region on equal footing with the evidence that people in general no longer use decrepid (it's been about 40 times rarer since the 1800s) and now regard it as a misspelling (the most recent dictionaries I can find decrepid in are ones from the 1890s that call it a misspelling already back then, as do the only modern sites I can find talking about it). If we can find proper documentation of decrepid being a spelling some community of speakers, e.g. in Norfolk, still use, we could add information about that. And if we can get some data on how often people pronounce it with /-t/ vs /-d/, that might also be useful. I suspect some of the reason people (e.g. ) think decrepid exists is because they don't notice the /-t/ vs /-d/ (people notoriously often don't notice when other people pronounce things differently from them, e.g. Americans are split on having or not having the cot-caught merger, but most of the time most people don't notice when other people differ from themselves in whether they have it or not). One idea for leads would be to check how often decrepid vs decrepit occurs in e.g. newspapers in areas which are thought to still use -d. Even then, I'm going to guess this isn't commonly enough used for the label to end up being anything weaker than ~en. - -sche (discuss) 15:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)