Talk:ire

ireless (free from ire; not angry?) is valid in Scrabble, but there are so many scannos for wireless, fireless, etc. that I cannot confirm its existence or find citations from Google Books. Equinox ◑ 01:39, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

RFV discussion: August–September 2022
The verb form is in no major dictionaries and Google ngram viewer shows virtually no use of conjugations like ‘ired’. JamesLucas (" " / +) 21:20, 25 August 2022 (UTC)


 * OED marks it “obsolete, rare” and has only one quotation which dates to c. 1420, so it may not have survived beyond Middle English. — Sgconlaw (talk) 21:58, 25 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Wright's English Dialect Dictionary has nothing for this as a verb, either. He does have a dialectal use of the noun in the Shetlands for "a passion, a fit of wrath", quoting an October 15th 1898 Shetland News article "Shü wis in sic a ire o' wraeth 'at shü'd no tought a eetim o' laein him caald." Searching turned up this and this which initially seemed very promising, but closer inspection revealed that the repeated instances of ired and iring in each snippet were scannos and the actual page has fired, firing. Other examples are scannos or pronunciation spellings of hired. - -sche (discuss) 00:03, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The phrases quick to ire, slow to ire, etc. see a lot of use. It could be cited just from those. This, that and the other (talk) 11:41, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Can we find any inflected forms of ire? (I tried searching for "quick to ire" + "ired" or "iring" but Google didn't show anything beyond scannos of fire, which are surprisingly common.) Quick/slow to ire could also be, like (from Google Books) "he is quick to laughter and quick to tears, quick to compassion, quick to alleviate hardship" and . The coordination of three nouns and a verb in the first one shows that even instances like "Caroline even though quick to ire was also quick to laugh" could be . It seems reasonable that ire should exist as a verb somewhere, but unless we can find unambiguous evidence, Occam's razor would say not to posit another part of speech if the available evidence (quick to ire) can be explained by the existing noun POS. - -sche (discuss) 16:18, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Hah, before I posted that comment I thought hard about whether this could possibly be a noun POS and I came to the conclusion that it was far more likely to be a verb, but it's really not possible to be sure.
 * Here are some assorted uses: "he ires you"; "it ired me that..." (impersonal); "it ired him that..." (impersonal); "Gates was ired that..."; "it ired me up" (error for "fired me up"?); 'she was "ired" by...' This, that and the other (talk) 01:42, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Cited now, I believe. This, that and the other (talk) 04:17, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It occurred to me that some of the uses of ired could be errors/typos for irked, but I don't know how we could ever be sure of this. This, that and the other (talk) 12:00, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, yes... can we find any another another ( ← there's me accidentally leaving in a few too many letters, how apropos ) example of to ire or 3sg. ires (where typing e for k seems unlikely compared to just omitting k in ir(k)ed, ir(k)ing; compare reconditing, where -ion- was typoed out in some editions of some works), or spoken examples, or examples in pronunciation spelling like "hee aierd mee"? The Hawkswood cite of ires looks good, and I just found and added a cite about "rage patterns [...] when anything seems to ire me". Probably the translations table should be moved to (or at a minimum, crosslinked with) anger, btw. - -sche (discuss) 16:29, 27 August 2022 (UTC) - -sche (discuss) 16:32, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Aha, I found another cite of to ire me in the speech of a Southern US doctor, and "the thing that angers and ires me the most" in a Canadian parliamentary debate. I suppose this still doesn't rule out them all being typos where e has been substituted for k, but IMO it does make it seem most likely (on a balance) that it's a verb to ire. I suppose examples where it's used multiple times would be even better and an audio example would be the holy grail/Holy Grail, but all this is probably enough (plus the OED having the Middle English verb makes it more plausible). (Incidentally, we need to sync those pages which give wildly different definitions for the figurative sense.) - -sche (discuss) 16:45, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
 * , I’m impressed by the number of examples you were able to unearth—kudos on serious biblio-sleuthing! I also see that you’ve marked the use of ‘ire’ as a verb rare, which strikes me as a step in the right direction.
 * With that said, I still feel like including this definition at all is akin to accepting ‘there’ as a valid alternate spelling of ‘their’ simply because many YouTube commenters interchange the two. The 1968 example seems to be using quotation marks to actively mock the speaker naïve enough to use ‘ire’ as a verb, and the texts from which many of the other examples come include an appreciable amount of non-standard English. For instance, the 2011 text from which one example comes uses apostrophe-s to pluralize words (e.g., “I want to thank my teacher’s”)—a practice which is pretty universally deprecated.
 * Cheers JamesLucas (" " / +) 03:29, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
 * This is similar to TheDaveRoss's comments about and other rare terms, but unlike purportion (which seems like it might be a non-native error, at least in some cases), to ire is native English going back to Middle English. Finding it in the professional speeches of doctors and parliamentarians (or their translators) across countries and centuries puts it in a different category from theire, as does the fact that while writing thier for their is a simple enough typo or misspelling, someone saying something ires them is obviously not misspelling angers. (Ired could be an erroneous omission of k from irked, but writing e for k seems unlikely.) Some uses occur in dialectal speech, possibly non-native speech (2016), jokes (1880), or works that also contain misspellings, but others don't, so I don't know if adding labels like "sometimes dialectal, sometimes jocular" would be advisable, since most words are capable of also being used in dialects and jokes, etc. Perhaps other editors can weigh in on how best to tag this. We could stand to move the lower-quality citations (like any from works with typos), perhaps even also all the cites of ired where an omitted k is plausible, to the Citations page, but even then there are enough cites to attest this verb. - -sche (discuss) 18:09, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
 * , I take your point, and I think removing or relocating certain citations (namely those from 1962, 1968, 2011, and 2016) to a less prominent place would be good. Thanks! JamesLucas (" " / +) 19:23, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Louis L'amour (the 1962 cite) uses this verb in several of his works, so I wouldn't remove that one. It's not entirely clear why the authors of the 1968 report put the verb in quotes - perhaps because it was a direct quote utilised in order to properly capture Mary Farley's sentiment. I got rid of the other two cites; I agree that they detract from the quality of the entry. No real need to keep them on the cites page. This, that and the other (talk) 13:25, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
 * One also can find "quick to wrath", "slow to wrath", etc., especially in biblical contexts. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:20, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I did a search for the presumed archaic inflected forms irest, iredst, and ireth, but in the first ten pages of Google Books results the only use I found was the one found in the OED which dates to c. 1420. The rest were scannos. — Sgconlaw (talk) 16:39, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Passed. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:22, 20 September 2022 (UTC)