Talk:wibble

Informal pronunciation of www
The often unreliable claims that this is sometimes used as a pronunciation of www in Web addresses. Equinox ◑ 23:27, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

RFV discussion: March–July 2023
Sense: "to be overwhelmed by emotion and take on a childish expression with a quivering lips and chin". The definition seems overly specific compared to the more general sense "to wobble" (which I've just added to the entry). I could find uses like "his bottom lip wibbling" and "her chin was wibbling" but these are just examples of the other sense. Einstein2 (talk) 20:11, 23 March 2023 (UTC)


 * RFV failed, sense removed Mintprepper (talk) 18:15, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

RFV discussion: March–August 2023
"(British, programming) Used as the name of a metasyntactic variable."

Just in case there's still anyone on Wiktionary who isn't a programmer: a variable is a named value in a program, like numberOfEmailMessages, and a metasyntactic variable is a placeholder variable name where it doesn't matter what the variable means. There are some traditional ones like foo, bar and baz.

My problem here is that I don't think we could ever attest this in English, nor as a noun. Computer program code is not a human language and does not have (natural) grammar or parts of speech. (If you think you can do it, beyond mentions like "increment wibble by 1", then have at it!) So: should we make it Translingual? No. It's still not human language, and anyway this one is marked as "British": an American or French programmer presumably would not use it. Equinox ◑ 00:14, 23 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Well I added one where it's used as a variable name in a pair of English sentences if that counts... ? I think this might be handled better at RFD, but it seems like foo, bar, baz, foobar, quux are defined similarly atm and are currently justified as placeholder terms, though I'm not convinced at all that metasyntactic variable names are doing the same thing as proper placeholder terms like "blah blah" and "John Q. Public" and the like—my inclination would be to move all of these to an appendix. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 00:36, 23 March 2023 (UTC)


 * If something is definitionally meaningless, why include it? - TheDaveRoss  17:56, 9 June 2023 (UTC)
 * There are loads of examples of terms that are meaningless semantically but are lexically significant because they're used in particular ways, like most interjections. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:33, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
 * @Al-Muqanna But in this case literally anything is equally valid. Every letter and likely every double and tripled letter in English will be citable as variables in code or in algebra, but it wouldn't help anyone to include such senses. Interjections are usually at least narrow semantically even if not specific, whereas this has no semantic or lexical specificity. - TheDaveRoss  14:45, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree, hence my suggestion above, I was just responding to the bald idea that we shouldn't include "meaningless" terms. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 14:52, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

RFV-failed. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:35, 7 August 2023 (UTC)