Talk:seldom

'Seldom' is also an adjective. Some-one should add this to the article. 82.0.83.149 12:58, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

RFD discussion: April 2019
I was kind of amazed to find out that Wiktionary added "seldom" as an adjective, going as far as adding derivatives like "seldomer" and "seldomness", which simply don't exist!

I'm not a native English speaker, so I have seen "seldom" used as a synonym for "rare" by peers, as "seldom" is an adverb not ended in "-ly", making them use it erroneously as an adjective, e.g., "a seldom car", meaning "a rare car", or going the whole way to "seldomly used", instead of "seldom used".

I don't think that Wiktionary should incorporate a wrong word usage, even if that mistake is recurring in some groups.


 * For words which don't exist, people sure do seem to use them a lot. W.F. Colliers even included as an exemplar adjective in his dictionary. Other dictionaries (Oxford, M-W, AHD, etc.) include  as an adverb and adjective, some even mentioning  as a noun form. It is a trait of languages that mistakes which are repeated often enough stop being mistakes and start being rules. In this case, however, the mistake is mostly in your assumptions about which words exist and which do not. -  TheDaveRoss  15:57, 4 April 2019 (UTC)


 * English writers have committed this error for quite some time; in fact, it saw print as early as 1609. --Lambiam 17:43, 4 April 2019 (UTC)


 * This is an RFV matter if you wish to pursue it, but from the comments above it seems likely it would pass RFV (indeed, it seems you know this and simply don't like it). As far as RFD is concerned, kept. - -sche (discuss) 17:59, 22 April 2019 (UTC)