Wiktionary:Tea room/2023/August

neoracism and cultural racism
According to Wikipedia, is cultural racism, which they define as "discrimination based on cultural differences between ethnic or racial groups". I am unclear of which of our senses covers this. Our first one just mentions nationality/ethnicity-based discrimination, while our third seems to be said by conservatives referring to left-wing ideas on race. [1] Is one intended to refer to that? Or do I need to make a fourth def?

[1] Our definition doesn't mention conservatives, the quotes make it seem that way. cf (talk) 03:34, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * added this to sense 1 cf (talk) 23:40, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

quicumque
Which syllable of quicumque is stressed? Based on basic Latin phonology, I think it should be on cum (the penult), as shown in the entry, but -cumque says, Terms formed with this suffix are invariably stressed on the antepenultimate. quandocumque seems to agree, but what about quicumque (and other words suffixed with -cumque)? Choclei (talk) 04:41, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The claim about it being antepenultimate looks wrong to me, and is certainly wrong in ecclesiastical usage where it's quicúmque (and also quandocúmque etc.). The old Sounds of Latin by Roland G. Kent states, "A long enclitic might accordingly by the penultimate law become orthotone; i.e., might have an accent, as in quī-cúmque". I suspect this is misapplication of the rule about stress usually falling on the syllable before an enclitic. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:18, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I've changed and the two errant entries  and  to stress the penult per the sources I could find, the other derivatives all had it marked on the penult already. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:03, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It looks like the note about antepenultimate stress in words ending in -cumque was added by GianWiki; do you remember what this was based on?--Urszag (talk) 22:38, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi. I can't really remember where I pulled that out of. It was around the time when I first started editing, and made a few blunders here and there. This is likely one of them (I mean, when I—just now—read about me having added the note about words in being stressed on the antepenultimate, I thought to myself "Why would I do that?"; then it dawned on me). I believe it was just my mistake. —— GianWiki (talk) 06:12, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh, thanks for the clarification! Al-Muqanna's suggestion that it was based on the rules for monosyllabic enclitics sounds plausible.--Urszag (talk) 04:35, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you, everyone, for your help! Choclei (talk) 15:59, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

We define as the plural form of, but I don't see it shown or mentioned anywhere on that page, particularly in the conjugation table. Leasnam (talk) 19:38, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Help in creating the page, Im trying to create a bio page and quoted all factual verifiable information with neutral point. its getting rejected?
 223.190.81.193 12:45, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
 * First off, this is Wiktionary, not Wikipedia. Content about specific individuals is typically not welcome here. 37.110.218.43 12:48, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
 * And in case you are considering adding a bio page to Wikipedia, please first read carefully, paying particular attention to the requirement of notability. A neutral point of view and providing sources for all factual information are not sufficient.

EN steeple, SA ?
Curious if there's any connection between these two.

Our entry at 🇨🇬 is missing any etym section, and 's etymology only goes to redlinked 🇨🇬, so those were dead ends. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 23:30, 4 August 2023 (UTC)


 * There is more for steeple at, and following that takes you back to PIE. The Sanskrit on the other hand looks rather unclear. OED pronounces its etymology uncertain, and from what I can gather in the literature the  provides a verbal root for it meaning "to heap", but modern scholars tend to think that's a fictive backformation. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:46, 4 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The original meanings of stupa are given as "topknot, mound", so it is more likely that they come from the same root as stub, namely Proto-Indo-European *(s)tewp-. 24.108.18.81 00:46, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Polybius square
What is a "visual fire telegraph", as mentioned here? I find the phrase nowhere outside of Wiktionary. Equinox ◑ 15:48, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Would guess they just meant fire-signalling as a form of "visual" telegraphy, that's what the wp article suggests ("The Polybius square was used to aid in telegraphy, specifically fire-signalling"). Could be clearer. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:10, 5 August 2023 (UTC)


 * A bit late to this talk thread. I just wanted to share the link to WP's article on optical telegraphs, which is interesting. Semaphores and lamps and shit. Clever stuff for its day. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:17, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Wish.com
I'm posting here not because I'm invested in the conversation or that I will likely be involved in this thread, but because the entry is tagged and no one has posted about it. You can check my talk to see a little discussion of it, but it's also in a thread that has a lot of irrelevant material, so to copy and paste a germane section with some editing to remove extraneous material: Would an uninvolved admin please restore the previous version (noun) until 1) [someone] opens a Tea Room thread proposing changing the POS to adjective and 2) obtains consensus supporting said change. I'm rather agnostic re: the POS. I think the cites support the "noun" designation. I went with "noun" because someone in the Grease Pit discussion proposed a non-gloss definition. And non-gloss definitions tend to work better for nouns than adjectives because of the way English works. "Noun" is more in keeping with the more cautious/conservative approach the Grease Pit thread seemed to favour. If someone added an adjective sense to Twitter, Facebook, etc. backed up with cites such as "Twitter discourse" or "Facebook culture," many would object that those represent attributive noun usages rather than true adjectival usages. But I get that POS questions can be complicated and somewhat subjective. I scratched my head when someone switched old man yells at cloud from "noun" to "phrase," but I didn't kick up dust over it... [this entry] need ought to go through the process of establishing consensus... Again, I'm not terribly invested in being in the conversation, but I'm passing it along for the community to get a consensus because it clearly needs it. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:14, 5 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Context: Grease_pit. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:33, 5 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I would probably say it's an attributive noun, and that Poundland and Tesco Value should be considered such as well, but I think a solid argument can be made for the adjective header.


 * The standard tests distinguishing an adjective from an attributive noun (cf. WT:English adjectives) are the existence of comparative/superlative forms and the term's use in a predicative position. The problem is that, in general, any arbitrary word or phrase can appear in these positions if abstracted from its part of speech—usually indicated with quotation marks in formal writing, e.g. "that's very 'John'"—and so in practice there's a quite large grey area where an attributive noun might be used reasonably frequently in those positions. That applies to 'Wish.com' if we consider the online usage (examples taken from Reddit): "the most Wish.com shit I've ever seen", "This whole thing is very Wish.com". In that case it's reasonable to ask whether it's better to just call it a day and consider it lexicalised as an adjective. If it is an adjective, though, then I don't see the point of the sense being a non-gloss def. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:43, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The comparative/superlative uses are what swing it for me. You're right that you can say "that's very John" (and I think that kind of predicative use can be done with any proper noun), but I'm less convinced that you can do that when it's placed in the attributive position ("the most Wish.com shit I've ever seen"). Maybe you can, but "that's the most John thing I've ever seen" feels awkward in a way that the previous example did not. Theknightwho (talk) 19:48, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I disagree that "the most John thing I've ever seen" is unnatural. Maybe it's more common in certain regions than others, but I've said similar things (and perhaps that exact sentence) many times. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 10:00, 12 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I am not sure if it's an adjective or a noun. "That's Wish.com" gives only resluts in the form of "that's Wish.com [noun]". However, what TKW did feels like he's shoving his agenda of "Wish.com is an adjective" down Wikt's throat.

cf (talk) 22:46, 5 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The citations I removed are clear uses of Wish.com as a proper noun, which don't support a noun or adjective use. It's not about shoving my views down anyone's throat - it's about making sure the evidence actually supports the entry. Theknightwho (talk) 22:58, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * : It would be better to segregate and add a label to explain why than to remove in cases like this where something is disputed and you want to avoid the appearance of bad faith. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:39, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Chuck Entz I did put it in the edit summary (repeatedly), but yes, they've been separated into a different section. Theknightwho (talk) 23:47, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Chuck Entz - Exactly. I make a habit of preserving pre-collected citations even if I don't use them when creating an entry/sense or personally consider them low-quality or off-the-mark. Both to respect the work done by whomever gathered them and because one never knows when they might come in handy. Certainly given that TKW and I share a fractious history, it's hard to interpret the arbitrary deletion of my work in a good light. To be perfectly frank it has an "I'm going to smash your sand-castle because I can" vibe for me. The prudent thing would have been to bring concerns regarding the chosen POS to a talk page before plowing ahead with a change that was likely to be disputed. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 00:10, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It wasn't arbitrary, and there was a good reason for it. Repeatedly claiming I was doing it for no reason is just lying. Theknightwho (talk) 00:32, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

I didn't want to comment further, but I feel a need to add that, while comparative/superlative uses are generally a good litmus test, they aren't a fool-proof metric. Very, at least, can be used somewhat adverbially, as in "the building is very Art Deco" or "I thought the movie was very film noir." I doubt many would argue in favour of treating or  as adjectives on account of such sporadic uses. Wish.com is a tricky one to POS, but I think "mostly-attributive noun" is the best fit, in that it covers all of the six gathered CFI-compliant cites. Perhaps even "proper noun," though I'd argue it's used more generically than specifically. "Adjective" creates more problems than it solves. Do you really want to open the door to adjective definitions for, , etc? I guess there's a case to be made that Facebook can be used with the connotation of "out-of-touch" ("Facebook memes") or Tumblr as a substitute for  ("Tumblr genders" etc.). But the precedent is against treating website names as adjectives, not in favour of it. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 20:37, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I think the Art Deco/film noir examples fall under the type of abstraction-from-POS I mentioned above (the NYT archives also offer "It's very art deco New York in the Twenties and Thirties", with the entire phrase being the predicate). In terms of specific tests, what still sways me towards "noun" over "adjective" is that predication seems to require the modifier: "that jacket is terrible", ?"that jacket is Wish.com". To me at least it's less convincing to worry about website names as a semantic category though, it needs to be decided on syntactic merits. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:44, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Al-Muqanna The distinct meaning test applies here, which doesn't seem to apply to any of the other examples. It certainly wouldn't apply to conventional attributive uses of Wish.com, which merely mean "bought from Wish.com" or "relating to the company Wish.com" etc. It certainly couldn't be used as a conventional noun with the meaning of being poor quality, because the whole point that that quality applies to the thing it is describing. Theknightwho (talk) 21:00, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The distinct meaning doesn't in principle apply to distinguishing between attributive nouns and adjectives, though (and so isn't listed under the relevant tests for that) since a noun can acquire a distinct meaning in attributive position without gaining the other syntactic characteristics of an adjective. Hence Vichy is basically not found in constructions like "more Vichy" or predicatively at all, despite being a distinct meaning. The fact that those do occur for Wish.com is probably more relevant. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:05, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

There seem to be no clear guideposts here. Some entries derived from proper nouns treat them as common nouns ; some treat them as proper nouns, though sometimes with figurative sub-senses. There's some degree of latitude in how such entries are constructed. They don't seem to be treated as adjectives, though, even when they're frequently used attributively. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 22:38, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The proper noun/common noun issue is a bit of a tangent since with "Wish.com" there's a more specific syntactic issue at stake than just how to treat figurative senses of proper nouns. In general it's probably better to treat extended senses of proper nouns as common nouns (with reference to uses like "a Voldemort", "bunch of Voldemorts"); in contrast to adjective vs. noun though there's no general linguistic standard for what constitutes a proper noun since the category has no particular syntactic significance—and proper nouns referring to 'specific things' is some sort of general standard, but never applied consistently. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:05, 5 August 2023 (UTC)


 * To me, this looks like an attributive noun in most of the cites (and simply a noun, in others), as does Poundland and Tesco Value and dollar-store, as Al-Muqanna's first comment said. It's unfortunate that the border between parts of speech is so fuzzy (not just with adjectives, either; nouns bleed into pronouns a lot, too: we have bro and man, and dude finna add a pronoun section to e.g. dude too, or could) . Some of the cites could be argued to be adjectives, but even those could also be argued to still be nouns IMO: e.g. "The most Wish.com shit I've ever seen" does not seem any different from e.g. "the most Trump thing I've ever heard". In cases where it's not clear whether something is an adjective or noun, I prefer an Occam's razor approach: "Wish.com" started as a noun (a proper noun, the name of a website), like e.g. Amazon; I would only posit additional parts of speech if there are cites that can only be explained by adding those parts of speech. - -sche (discuss) 09:18, 6 August 2023 (UTC)


 * and would seem to be adjectives given the hyphens and the existence of the unhyphenated nouns  and . Yes, some of the citations I gathered of dollar-store are unhyphenated, but there's four hyphenated uses on the citations page. Whether the unhyphenated instances therein represent an alternative formatting of the adjective dollar-store or the noun dollar store being used attributively seems like an academic question that isn't germane to the entry itself. At a certain point we've got to determine a POS for an entry and stick with it. Fragmenting an entry into multiple POS sections based on hair-splitting over cites ("that one's a noun," "that one's a proper noun," "that one's a true adjective") may satisfy a few of the nerds behind the curtain but it will also create unnecessary confusion for lay readers. I wanted one of the three "handpicked" cites featured in the entry proper to show the term being applied to an abstract concept rather than a material item that could actually (or at least conceivably) be found in a dollar store. This one was hard to attest due to the high signal-to-noise ratio. I had to manually think up phrases to search for (e.g. "dollar-store dress" and "dollar-store journalism"), and at a certain point I figured there were enough. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 14:08, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Noun phrases are generally hyphenated in attributive position, though. That isn't to say pound-shop and dollar-store in particular are better treated as nouns, but hyphenation means little. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:27, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Exactly, they're behaving just as I'd expect nouns to behave. Ironically, dollar-store seems to have even less evidence of adjectivity than Wish.com, since it's not even clear it can be graded: the hits I see for aren't comparative but are e.g. "drenched in more dollar-store body spray than your prom date", "real shoes—no more dollar-store flip-flops". I don't see any risk of fragmenting entries into unnecessary POS sections, because my position is, "if there are not cites that can only be analysed as an adjective, then continue to view the word as a noun; if there are cites that can only be analysed as an adjective, then view the word as an adjective", so the only time we'd have multiple POS is if there were some cites that could only be viewed as nouns (even their 'high-end luxury' stores were basically pound shops), and others that could only be viewed as adjectives (the pound-shoppest crap I've ever seen). Should we, I dunno, take a straw poll (with numbered !votes) and see what POS people think these kinds of words belong to? - -sche (discuss) 01:47, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't think you can group the proper noun cites in with the others: they're very clearly referring to the actual site (whether metaphorically or not). Theknightwho (talk) 04:26, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Parnell
This is somewhat contradictory.
 * Which is correct? Is it referring to Petronella in the etymology? DonnanZ (talk) 15:10, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I believe so, yes. In other words, we're saying that the modern given name Parnell isnt a continuation of the ancient Latin name Petronella, which is female, and probably wasn't much used in Britain for either boys or girls once the Romans left. The quote implies the given name took root in Ireland, as well, which was never controlled by the Romans, so there may be more history to look into, but for etymology's sake I think all we need to do is make sure readers realize that the original name was Petronella.  — Soap — 06:39, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, I added the qualifier to the surname. That should help those confused. Cheers. DonnanZ (talk) 08:05, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I believe so, yes. In other words, we're saying that the modern given name Parnell isnt a continuation of the ancient Latin name Petronella, which is female, and probably wasn't much used in Britain for either boys or girls once the Romans left. The quote implies the given name took root in Ireland, as well, which was never controlled by the Romans, so there may be more history to look into, but for etymology's sake I think all we need to do is make sure readers realize that the original name was Petronella.  — Soap — 06:39, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, I added the qualifier to the surname. That should help those confused. Cheers. DonnanZ (talk) 08:05, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

betake
Sense 6, To take oneself. , appears to be the same as sense 3, To take oneself to; go or move; ; resort; have recourse. . The Oxford Dictionary of English does list it, although it says it is literary (nowadays anyway, and they only have the reflexive sense), so it may not be as archaic as we make out. DonnanZ (talk) 12:02, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree it's better labelled literary rather than archaic, it's easy to find recent uses in newspapers. Afaik it does not have a non-reflexive intransitive use like "He betook out of the library", I cannot find any examples without the reflexive pronoun on Google Books. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:09, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I should have added the Oxford def: "go to". Collins also has betake oneself: "to go, move", and an archaic sense: "to apply (oneself) to". So there could be an archaic reflexive sense, maybe like "She betook herself to make cakes". I don't know. DonnanZ (talk) 13:00, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * If the reflexive pronoun is obligatory for some senses, these should be listed under the lemma . Currently, the reflexive senses can fail the substitutivity test: if to betake really meant “to take oneself to”, then the meaning of “Fireman Richardson betook himself to the refreshment room” should be the same as, “Fireman Richardson took himself to himself to the refreshment room”. --Lambiam 22:25, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
 * There does not seem to be any consistent practice on that at the moment. Phrases like resign oneself and shit oneself are treated as lemmas but then compare the vast majority of lemmas under Category:English reflexive verbs; absent oneself is currently a redirect to a reflexive sense at absent, kick oneself simply redirects to kick without the link to the pertinent sense. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:57, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * In simpler non-literary and non-reflexive language "Fireman Richardson went to the refreshment room". As the event (in the quote I added) occurred in 1863, I can't tell if the writer used his own language (around 1949), or language from reports written in 1863. There is still the question of whether we need sense 6. DonnanZ (talk) 07:55, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * (@Lambiam and Al-Muqanna) Yeah, we should probably have a poll in the BP or something, about whether reflexive verbs (or at least English ones) should include oneself or not; the current inconsistency has been brought up before, e.g. Tea room/2022/July and the sadly low-participation Beer parlour/2021/February. For verbs like bear where the 'object' can be only semantically and not directly grammatically reflexive (he bore his body with all the grace of youth), there is a decent case (IMO) for it being at the bare form. But for verbs that require reflexive pronouns/particles, I'm initially inclined to include the oneself. But I also understand the argument that having redirects and consolidating the content in one place (especially for polysemous verbs) might be more user friendly, and it's been argued we do that for some other languages, e.g. befinden (although IMO we should probably have redirects from the sich ... forms!). - -sche (discuss) 01:05, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Wouldn't a redirect be better than having one entry for betake and a separate one for betake oneself? DCDuring (talk) 23:06, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * That's quite possible. I certainly wouldn't oppose systematically redirecting these. In general, I think we need to either centralize such things, or prominently link all the other places we hide definitions that of a given term, like with prominently linking cases where some definitions are at the plural, a form with the, etc. - -sche (discuss) 13:02, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd favor centralization with redirects to the most important reflexive sense using senseid with other reflexive senses (if any) below it. Possible user confusion could still arise should two different etymologies be involved or should there be compelling reason to separate two reflexive definitions so that they don't appear on the same screen, but such cases should be rare. DCDuring (talk) 14:08, 10 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Why is the "beteach" Etymology listed first? Beteach is a particularly bad word to use in a definition, thought it is understandable in this case, given that there a six definitions of beteach. DCDuring (talk) 23:06, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * No idea. It was added (and placed there) by Leasnam in 2012, diff DonnanZ (talk) 09:36, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Why am I not surprised? DCDuring (talk) 12:40, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Reordered. DCDuring (talk) 14:09, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * That's better, I think. DonnanZ (talk) 17:31, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Normally, I'd prefer some kind of historical ordering. But in this case both rarity and definition ugliness argued to demote the beteach section. DCDuring (talk) 18:40, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

en brosse
I changed the English from noun to adverb, based on the citation given. I think this needs to be done for the French too. It's currently given as a feminine noun, but I can't find "une en brosse"! Equinox ◑ 11:32, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The French entry should be deleted (as it is SoP regardless of PoS), it is already covered in . — Fenakhay ( حيطي · مساهماتي ) 11:41, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

uninvited
Defined as "(rare) One who was not invited.", with the sole citation being of the plural form. Assuming I am correct in assuming that "an/one uninvited" is not attestable with uninvited interpretable as a noun, shouldn't this noun sense only appear at the plural form? It is particularly irksome that the definition leads with "one". DCDuring (talk) 13:07, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Same applies to invited. Equinox ◑ 13:07, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I wonder how many other cases there are of past participles being used as nouns with the singular being rare or unattestable. Is it part of English grammar that any past participle can be forced into use as a noun, more often plural that singular, just as almost any noun can be forced into uncountable use or even use as a verb? Having entries for such things seems silly. DCDuring (talk) 13:19, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * You (I think) once said the same about the -ings plurals. I think it is silly not to have such things, when they are real words in use. Equinox ◑ 13:57, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Analysing words like метеорологичен
@Chernorizets, @Bezimenen: how should we analyse the formation of words like метеорологичен, кардиологичен, and so on? ? I see no such suffix used for other languages, so I don't know what the actual morphology of words like these is, so we can make the etymology very clear for entries like these. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 18:39, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * In principle, = 🇨🇬 + 🇨🇬. I am not sure how one should treat such mixed suffixes (half borrowed, half native). Безименен (talk) 18:45, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Cf. 🇨🇬. Nicodene (talk) 18:56, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Kiril kovachev the English equivalent is and its etymology notes show a similar derivation pattern to what @Bezimenen has provided for the Bulgarian one. Then,  is analyzed precisely as . We should create a similar page for . Chernorizets (talk) 21:33, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Perfect, I created, please let me know whether what I've written is valid—specifically, I don't know if 'blend' is correct in this case or not; also, I take it this is only appended to nouns, as I've written in the definition? With regard to the suffix's treatment, @Bezimenen I feel like your analysis is ideal and that we should redirect usages of this suffix to that entry so that its etymology can be displayed in one place. Hypothetically, if a word were taken from Latin that already end in , though, and are adapted to Bulgarian via , I guess we should just analyse it as e.g. ? @Chernorizets @Nicodene Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 22:38, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Bulgarian бля́сък etymology
I was editing this word in Bulgarian:, when I read from Bulgarian Etymological Dictionary (source) that the supposed OCS origin of this word is , but 2A00:23C7:9C97:8201:27:16EE:6741:107D informed me that the form бльскъ would give Bulgarian and removed the OCS as the Bulgarian etymon. Now I have some questions: @Bezimenen I believe you may be experienced enough to say? Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 17:52, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * 1) Did I misread the BER source? ESSJa states that the OCS is  and not ; I don't know OCS so I can't judge which is meant to be correct, and I'm guessing it's not both. It looks to me like the BER fairly clearly writes two ъ's, which can only be squared with the even-clearer ESSJa print by either the fact that I misread the BER, or that it's misprinted, or that it reflects a different word/stage in its development than I was expecting to see...
 * 2) Does this also mean that the Bulgarian бля́сък does not in fact derive from OCS бльскъ? How am I supposed to tell that from the BER entry?
 * 3) And if it doesn't, what is the relationship between OCS бльскъ and BG бля́сък? Why would the OCS not descend to Bulgarian, but rather the term pass "directly" from Proto-Slavic to BG?
 * 2A00:23C7:9C97:8201:27:16EE:6741:107D was me. Simply the standard spelling is with -ь-. 🇨🇬 is just a doublet (after 11-12 century ь and ъ started being used interchangeably in certain environments, like in tautosyllabic environment with a sonorant). The relationship between ~  ~  is due to vowel mutation. Respectively, they correspond to 0-grade ~ e-grade ~ o-grade of the same root. This stems from the grammatical principles of Proto-Indo-European, where this process was productive (known as IE ablaut). That's why we have pairs such as  ~,  ~ ,  ~  and so on. Безименен (talk) 12:42, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * PS: 🇨🇬 technically yields 🇨🇬, that's why I removed it from the etymology of (the two are certainly related, though, simply not in a direct way). Безименен (talk) 12:46, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Bezimenen OK, thanks for the clarification. But there's still one element that I'm confused about, which is that BER relates OCS бльскъ under the head of блестя, бляскам, ... etc., with a "derived term" under the same header of блясък — which is why I assumed this Old Church Slavonic term to be the parent of the Bulgarian. What's the Old Church Slavonic that actually corresponds to 🇨🇬? How can I read those BER entries to avoid making the same mistake again? Additionally under : is it correct to say that the Bulgarian, besides being inherited from Proto-Slavic, was also inherited from the Old Church Slavonic term listed as a cognate? Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 12:58, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Technically, the vowel mutation is also an instance of grammatical derivation, that's why some dictionaries treat apophonic lemmas as derivatives of each other. I don't think Wiktionary process them in that way, though. The expected ancestor of would be 🇨🇬, but for some reason it's not (explicitly) attested. OCS prefers  . In the case of Bulgarian, any instance of OCS -рь/ръ- or -ль/лъ- within closed environment later becomes a syllabic -р- or -л- (like in various Torlak dialects nowadays) and eventually in standard Bulgarian, it is rendered as alternating -ър/ръ- or -ъл/лъ- (depending on the number of consonants on the two sides: e.g.  ~,  ~ ). In contrast OCS -ѣ- gives Bulg. -я/е-. That's one way to find correspondences between OCS terms and their modern Bulgarian counterparts. Безименен (talk) 13:21, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Peroxyflavin
I encountered "peroxyflavin" by clicking through random entries, as I do, and I found the given definition lacking. I then searched the Internet for relevant quotations/definitions/information, and discovered very little that could aid me in improving the page. Furthermore, ChatGPT claims to know nothing about such a term.

Should this page be deleted, or can it be improved somehow? It seems to me that related terms like riboflavin, lyxoflavin, and hepatoflavin have all received at least slightly more attention, though Google Ngrams suggests that, in recent years, "peroxyflavin" is more common than those latter two. Thoughts? Multiple Mooses (talk) 04:28, 10 August 2023 (UTC)


 * It is trivial to attest so no it shouldn't be deleted. ChatGPT is also not a useful source for this kind of information. Unlike the others you've listed it is a genre of compound and not a specific substance, so there's not too much to say, but I've tried to expand the entry a bit. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:12, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

порывисто: Definition missing or { {rfdef} } forgotten?
At there is a definition and a, and I do not know if the latter is redundant — any ideas? PJTraill (talk) 12:55, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

касис
If I have understood corretly then both of the references in and  show касис as singular only, but the declension table in  gives plurals as well. Anyone know which is correct? I have only included the singular forms in the Wikt page for now. SimonWikt (talk) 15:59, 10 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @SimonWikt I think Chitanka will generate a full declension table regardless of whether or not a noun is countable. In this case, it's uncountable, and I double-checked in a dictionary derived from the Bulgarian National Corpus which includes various word forms. There were no occurrences of plural forms for "касис". Chernorizets (talk) 07:47, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Chernorizets Thanks. SimonWikt (talk) 09:32, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

neurosthenia
Currently there is no entry for. At first glance, it seems to be an alternative (although possibly archaic) form of (from  + ), characterized by a weakness of the nerves (as seen in ). However, certain dictionaries treat it as distinct from neurasthenia, and define it as an excessive response of the nerves, in which case its surface analysis would be +. I could not find the word in any general dictionaries. Many uses can be found in old medical books and articles, although in most cases it seems impossible to determine which sense the term refers to. Should we have two different definition lines (and etymologies) or merge them into one? Einstein2 (talk) 22:06, 11 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I took care of it. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:21, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Hebei/Hubei Misspelling or Usage Note
Hey, I'm trying to determine whether I've got a Misspellings or a typo and/or a usage note. Here's the deal: Citations:Hebei has a list of probably WT:ATTEST meeting cites that show that people call Hubei "Hebei" by mistake (and Hupei as "Hopei"). What does the evidence prove to you? To me, I think a usage note may be helpful, stating that Hubei is frequently confused with Hebei. Another alternative is to just add another etymology and say misspelling of|en|Hubei. Or if this is a typo, then idk if either of those is allowed. Many foreigners in Wuhan will use "Hebei" on their WeChat account by mistake. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 11:45, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It is more likely to be straightforward confusion than just misspelling or a typo, given that people will also say it and not just write it. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 11:50, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The possibility of confusion seems clear. I have added a link to "Hubei" at the top of the "Hebei" page- see . --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:58, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
 * That's not what the top links are for. You can use something like resembles (currently very underused) in the "See also" section, or just link it directly. I've changed it to a resembles link. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:02, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Excellent! I was totally unaware of resembles. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 18:03, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

I would like to suggest that resembles be mentioned in the text of Template:also so that people exploring these kinds of easily confused or similar words are alerted to the existence of resembles as a possible solution for easily confused words. Geographyinitiative (talk) 19:34, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Trinitarian subsenses at God
Since 2018, has listed "God the Father" and "God the Son" as subsenses. The current setup seems a bit problematic for a few reasons. Firstly, the current glosses make pronouncements attributing a specific theology to all of Christianity, stating that the Trinitarian God the Father is described in the Old Testament, etc. Secondly, I'm not sure it's lexicographically accurate, and the more I think about how to make the entry more rigorous the less convinced I am that it's useful. "God" in the title "Mother of God", cited as a usex, does not mean God the Son, it's entailed by it. In anything predicated of a person of the Trinity can also be predicated of God. It's fairly trivial to find examples where "God" is used specifically to describe an action of the Holy Spirit (e.g. "God descended on those gathered in the upper room at Pentecost"), so should God the Spirit also have a subsense?

I think the sort of use in the quotation under 1.1 ("God sent Jesus to earth ...") might merit a "For Trinitarian Christians, God the Father as distinct from Jesus" subsense or usage note, but otherwise I suspect that we are being too clever wading into the thickets of Trinitarian theology. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 21:23, 12 August 2023 (UTC)


 * We should be happy if we can just have appropriate handling of god vs. God. Isn't using god to refer to the entity Christians and others refer to as God derogatory? It may even rise above being a mere micro-aggression.
 * Most modern dictionaries don't get into very specific theology; they err toward the ecumenical. DCDuring (talk) 04:22, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I would agree overall. I do think that "God" meaning specifically "God the Father" should be listed as a subsense, because God the Father can be referred to as simply "God" alongside mentions of the Son or the Holy Spirit (in orthodox/Nicene Christianity, you can say that God sent the Son while still holding the Son to be God). However, "God the Son" or "God the Holy Spirit" are called "God" not by denotation, but by predication. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:55, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Which is the proper way to write the Cantonese word "me2"
This word means "askew" or "crooked", but as a native speaker and according to my knowledge, the pronunciation of the character can only be "waai1". There are sources on the internet saying that the original character is. Mahogany115 (talk) 01:19, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Nine times out of ten Cantonese 本字 claims on the Internet are erroneous. RcAlex36 (talk) 02:07, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I mean this character is like the Japanese "kunyomi" instead of the proper way to write it and it should not be in this form in Wiktionary. is the closest one.Mahogany115 (talk) 04:01, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Who decides what is proper orthography, in the absence of an authoritative body or source that regulates the language? If we go by dictionaries, then jyut.net shows a number of character dictionaries that record the me2 reading for 歪. There are 269 hits for 借歪 on lihkg.com, which attest to the practice of writing me2 as 歪. Also, 訓讀 does exist in Cantonese. RcAlex36 (talk) 04:43, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Mahogany115 We're not prescriptive, so we're not going to delete this for the same reason we aren't going to delete things that originated on the internet, either. Theknightwho (talk) 14:58, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

хибискус
I am trying to add the declension for the Bulgarian word хибискус but it won't let me with knowing which syllable is stressed. Can anyone help, as I am unable to find out? Thanks SimonWikt (talk) 12:42, 13 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @SimonWikt the correct stress would be хиби́скус. Chernorizets (talk) 07:42, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Chernorizets Thanks. SimonWikt (talk) 09:21, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

away
The interjection Come on! Go on!

I've never heard this in my life (as someone who lives there), but is this a miscontruction of Geordie (which is pretty common)? is pronounced +, with the stress on the second syllable, so I suspect someone unfamiliar with it could easily mishear it as. Theknightwho (talk) 15:08, 13 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Certainly in writing "Away the lads" is pretty common as a cry of encouragement. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:01, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @RichardW57m Not seeing anything on GBooks for, and the few examples I can find online seem to be misconstructions of , which is very well-known as a Geordie expression. Theknightwho (talk) 19:56, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It's a chapter heading at https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Denied_Promotion_By_A_Tree/lkGMEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22away+the+lads%22&pg=PA17&printsec=frontcover. Are you sure the Geordie expression isn't a modification of the h-less form?  We don't have an etymology to root the Geordie form.  I think the first place I came across the expression was the novelisation of the Beiderbacke Affair, which seems unknown to Google Books. --RichardW57m (talk) 09:05, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * If you read on to the content, that chapter heading is intended as a pun. It's talking about away games. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:52, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * A pun is evidence of both words or meanings! --RichardW57m (talk) 15:56, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * In this particular case it's evidence that they have changed "Howay"/"Haway" to "Away" in order to make a pun about away games. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:16, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Not really evidence of change. And we can find the sense claimed for 'away' in a quote from 1876 at https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=41403 ascribed to Charles Mackay. --RichardW57m (talk) 16:32, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * was not, to my knowledge, from Tyneside, and his use appears to be exceptional. The OED lemmatises the interjection at howay, giving the variant haway, and gives the etymology "how int. + way adv." Their earliest attestation is the 1825 Glossary of North Country Words, where it is spelled "How'way". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:37, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @RichardW57m @Al-Muqanna It's probably best to take this to RFV, but at the very least it's going to be a rare alt form. However, I'm still not convinced. Theknightwho (talk) 16:55, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * As an IP wrote today and Fay Freak deleted, "they could be coincidence. Encouragement is also expressed in ask away and many other fairly transparent expressions like it".
 * There's certainly a possibility of contamination. --RichardW57 (talk) 20:26, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

maknoon
I received this comment, but I can't read Arabic, so maybe someone can help: ''Hi, there are two different roots: ج ن ن and ك ن ن. If the entity is about the root ك ن ن, the adjective shouldn't be crazy or mad. crazy and mad in Arabic means مجنون from the root ج ن ن, not ك ن ن. مكنون may mean protected, concealed or Hidden. Karim185.3 (talk) 17:40, 13 August 2023 (UTC)'' Equinox ◑ 18:01, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, and you can read كن and جن that it may make the difference more clear. Karim185.3 (talk) 16:17, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

undecipher
I don't understand how un- + decipher could mean "to decipher". I haven't found any attestation of this word outside of the cited example, which to me seems to have been an error on the writer's part. Fehufanga (talk) 01:20, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * : It's rare, but it's real. The first edition of the OED has it, and the use of un- is explained here. One can find examples such as this 1654 passage (also in the NED) and this book (look for the 19 at the end of the sentence). Chuck Entz (talk) 02:15, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * And there's a parallel in undecrypt, which renders undecrypted unintelligible! RichardW57m (talk) 12:15, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

up to
Too many senses, lots of unclear distinctions. What's the difference between PUC – 08:56, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * senses 7 ("For the option or decision of": "It’s up to you whether to get the blue one or the red one"), 9 ("Incumbent upon; the obligation of; the duty of": "It's up to the prosecution to prove that the defendant is guilty") and 11 ("Within the authority or jurisdiction of")?
 * sense 5 ("As much as; no more than": "You can make up to five copies") and the "adjectival" sense ("maximum of": "Violators may face a fine of up to $300")?
 * senses 2 ("Capable of": "Are you up to lifting something that heavy?") and 3 ("Ready for": "Are you up to the challenge?")?
 * I’ve done that. Even two definitions less from . 11 to your 7 and 9, as I defined it, and 4 also to 2 and 3: Essentializing the distinction between capability and will is Christian sectarian propaganda, will is well determined by capabilities, as also the capabilities available determine when you are ready, and in fact having willpower is a capability. In the most primitive functions this becomes evident: If my digestive systems are satiated suddenly I “don’t want” to eat anymore. Reversely, if I have an aversion (a constant not-willing) I will not be able to eat a certain food-item, and will not do certain sports that are “up to me”. Do people really do things because they want them, or do they want because they made an investment decision with the available supplies, according to their experience in it? It is just a convention to speak otherwise, a breviloquence (“I did X because I wanted …”). Of course in some cases the decision must be faster and stronger for survival and one really wants to eat aught or encroach upon an enemy that has transgressed upon you, but there is no dualism. The future tense in English expressed with or in Serbo-Croatian with  etc., equating what is willed and what may come, is based on this insight, and it is not difficult to understand for readers either if you put will in its systematic place. Fay Freak (talk) 09:32, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I disagree that the distinction between "can" and "want" is Christian sectarian propaganda. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 09:46, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I didn’t claim it either. I said “essentializing” it. Like putting it on a metaphysical level where their conditions are not connected, so that one is free to maintain beliefs, in causation external to the world. Of course everyone is free to see himself as an external actor nonetheless for an explanatory model. But because they are connected, the contexts in which related words arise may be regarded as identical, up to the meanings of words entering the lexicon. Unfortunately, the thinking habits that have caught on, as capturing thought collectives that create majority beliefs relevant to the dictionary editor, follow Descartes’s egotism and not who deconstructed the fun, and the modern spontaneity that could lead 2000s dictionary editors to demark the colloquial terms “up to” and “down to” somewhere in the fun-area is family-resemblant to freewillers. It still does not entail that the wordhoards of European languages are dualist in lexical meanings. Fay Freak (talk) 10:14, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

At  (Portuguese), it is said that this term is a "misspelling of " (with a hyphen), which I don't think is the case. There seems not to be a consensus regarding the use of a hyphen after  when it is used as a prefix (as in não-fumante vs. não fumante), but I wouldn't currently say that one is a "misspelling" of the other, but rather an alternative form. OweOwnAwe (talk) 19:12, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I've changed it to an alternative spelling and fixed the plural as well. Ultimateria (talk) 17:01, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Ukrainian verb infinitives
For a typical Ukrainian verb, спростити, the conjugation box states: "infinitive спрости́ти, спрости́ть". When is this second version used? On another website, it is only "Інфінітив спрости́ти" without that second version. -- LA2 (talk) 20:12, 14 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The second version of the infinitive is accounted for in § 118 of :
 * It is seldom seen in modern writing (as far as I've seen at least) but does crop up in older works. Here's an example (in bold) from Lesya Ukrainka:
 * Voltaigne (talk) 21:32, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Voltaigne (talk) 21:32, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Voltaigne (talk) 21:32, 14 August 2023 (UTC)


 * a little late but you may be interested in this previous discussion at Module talk:uk-verb. Helrasincke (talk) 10:10, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

exscind
I have no expertise with Wiktionary, so would someone please add the following example of non-medical usage. Such a delightful word needs to be better known and more often used.

It should also be a thesaurus entry as an alternative to excise (which also doesn’t appear in Thesaurus:destroy)

“It should be mentioned that matter which has became untrue by the progress of events since the first edition of this book has been carefully exscinded.” H. T. KEALING. Philadelphia, Pa., September 1, 1902. in Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 Author: William C. Nell Author of introduction, etc.: H. T. Kealing Wendell Phillips Release date: April 24, 2019 [eBook #59344] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59344/pg59344-images.html Humphrey Tribble (talk) 01:47, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I've added it as a quotation to exscind, and also changed the label to "chiefly" medicine, surgery, since I can see other non-medical examples. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:05, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

BRAHMI SIGN OLD TAMIL VIRAMA (U+11070) - Move page Request for Old Tamil Entries
Old Tamil entries titles using virama is Northern Brahmi script Virama (𑁆). But, In Old Tamil uses something different virama like a upper-right dot. Since Unicode created a separate Virama for Old Tamil in the version of 14.1. So like tell please move page BRAHMI VIRAMA (U+11046) ---> BRAHMI SIGN OLD TAMIL VIRAMA (U+11070). In English Wiktionary have Old Tamil 90+ entries. Thank you


 * Further Reading:
 * Brahmi script Unicode Chart
 * Comments on L2/20-069: Encoding of Tamil Brahmi Virama (U+11070)

Sriveenkat (talk) 17:20, 15 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Most of the allegedly Brahmi Old Tamil entries should actually be deleted for lack of attestation. The overlap between words attested in inscriptions and old Tamil words on Wiktionary is very small, or at least it was 14 months ago.  We may be in the awkward position that most attested Old Tamil is in a script unencoded in Unicode and therefore not valid for Wiktionary.  We also face the problem that many claims about Tamil are wishful thinking or outright lies. , you've examined literature on Tamil Brahmi - do we actually have any old Old Tamil manuscripts written in Tamil Brahmi?
 * From Mahadevan's book, the attestation of OLD TAMIL VIRAMA in inscriptions is actually very sparse, and is not unlike reading a blotchy photocopy.
 * The move can be done manually - 90+ entries is not many. I recommend that redirects be left, and I would consider adding back pointers to the pre-Unicode 14.0 encoding.  It will take a while for fonts supporting the new virama to become available.  Some of the redirects might need to be softened because of clashes with Sanskrit. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:37, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @RichardW57m I agree with you. Noto Sans Brahmi font is only supports Old Tamil Virama until now. Sriveenkat (talk) 15:10, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

virtue (sense 5)
Sense 5 ("virtues" as an angelic rank) says that the virtues are generally ranked above angels and below archangels. This is either a mistake or else it presupposes a very obscure angelology. Saint (or Pseudo-) Dionysius's angelology (which is by far the most popular) places the virtues in the middle of the middle hierarchy (fifth rank overall) whereas the archangels and angels are at the bottom of the bottom hierarchy (eighth and ninth ranks respectively, with nothing between them). The quoted passage from John Milton lists them in a slightly different order, but there's no indication that Milton places them between angels and archangels either. 2603:8080:C600:288F:0:0:0:1468 02:12, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Corrected, thanks. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:41, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Question
Can you fix lua error on 一 in "Okinawan", please? Frozen Bok (talk) 18:17, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @Frozen Bok, this isn't specific to Okinawan. This looks like the usual "out of memory" error due to built-in limits on how much memory the Lua processor is allowed to use.  You'll notice that the errors start towards the bottom of the 一 entry and continue through the end of the page.  (Or at any rate, that's what I'm seeing now.)
 * @Benwing2, if my fuzzy recollection serves, you've been working on similar issues, no? If not, do you know who else to ping? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:15, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Eirikr Many of these are ultimately due to changes in core modules made by User:Theknightwho. I have asked them to add common-case optimizations, which should help with the memory issues, but they haven't done it. @Theknightwho do you think you could take a bit of time out of your parser work to do this? It doesn't look like your parser will be ready any time soon and meanwhile we have ~ 50 out-of-memory pages in CAT:E. Benwing2 (talk) 19:37, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Benwing2 I can certainly try. Theknightwho (talk) 19:38, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

@Theknightwho Thanks! If you're looking for ideas, here is some code that I just wrote that does this when parsing author and similar params in quote-* templates. It optimizes to avoid loading Module:parse utilities in simple specs that don't use inline modifiers and such. It would seem to me there's a lot of scope for doing this in Module:links and such.

local function parse_multivalued_annotated_text(val, paramname, explicit_gloss, explicit_gloss_paramname) -- NOTE: In the code that follows, we use `entity` most of the time to refer to one of the semicolon-separated -- values in the multivalued param. Entities are most commonly people (typically authors, editors, translators or   -- the like), but may be the names of publishers, locations, or other entities. "Entity" can also refer to HTML -- entities; in the places where this occurs, the variable name contains 'html' in it. -- NOTE: We try hard to optimize this function for the common cases and avoid loading Module:parse utilities -- in such cases. The cases we can handle without loading Module:parse utilities are single values (no   -- semicolons present) without inline modifiers or language prefixes, and multi-entity values (semicolons present) -- without (a) brackets of any kind (including parens, braces and angle brackets; angle brackets typically indicate   -- inline modifiers and other brackets may protect a semicolon from being interpreted as a delimiter); -- (b) ampersands (which may indicate HTML entities, which protect a semicolon from being interpreted as a   -- delimiter); and (c) colons not followed by a space (which may indicate a language prefix). local function generate_obj(text, parse_err_or_paramname) local obj = {} if text:find(":[^ ]") then local actual_text, textlang = require(parse_utilities_module).parse_term_with_lang(text,               parse_err_or_paramname) obj.text = actual_text obj.lang = textlang else obj.text = text end obj.text = obj.text return obj end

-- Optimization #1: No semicolons or angle brackets (indicating inline modifiers). if not val:find("[<;]") then return {generate_obj(val, paramname)} end

-- Optimization #2: Semicolons but no angle brackets (indicating inline modifiers), braces, brackets, or parens (any   -- of which would protect the semicolon from interpretation as a delimiter), and no ampersand (which might indicate    -- an HTML entity with a terminating semicolon, which should not be interpreted as a delimiter). if not val:find("[<>%[%]{}&]") then local entity_objs = {} for entity in rgsplit(val, "%s*;%s*") do           table.insert(entity_objs, generate_obj(entity, paramname)) end return entity_objs end

-- The rest of the code does the general case. First we replace certain special HTML entities (those that are   -- bracket-like) with single Unicode characters. ...

Benwing2 (talk) 19:47, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @Benwing2 Thanks. One thing that's difficult is that many optimisations don't seem to save memory, even if they do mean less work overall. I'm certain it's something to do with, because this randomness doesn't happen with serialised data, but serialisation really slows things down when I try to generalise it. Theknightwho (talk) 14:30, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Theknightwho I would still implement the optimizations; there seems to be some randomness in Scribunto, as you've noted, but for the most part I've been able to add lots of code without increasing the number of cases in CAT:E, which suggests that on average they are having an effect. Perhaps two or three such optimizations together will make a big difference. Benwing2 (talk) 19:26, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

cacky as a noun?
I ran across our entry earlier today at cacky and was surprised to see that we only list an  part of speech. I grew up and have lived mostly in the US, so my familiarity with the nuances of UK colloquialisms is limited to my viewing of BBC, Channel 4, etc. media and reading of authors like Pratchett. Within that context, I'm accustomed to phrases like "in the cacky", where the term parses out to me as a noun.

Am I off-base? Or is our entry missing a noun sense? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:11, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The Collins English Dictionary only lists cacky as a British English adjective Cacky definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary (collinsdictionary.com), but it also indicates that it is derived from the noun Cack definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary (collinsdictionary.com). So you could be 'in the cack'.
 * SimonWikt (talk) 11:00, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I think "the cacky" is a Terry Pratchett-ism. There are a couple of independent instances of "in the cacky" on Google Books so I think it just about passes CFI, though I would mark it rare. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 17:08, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I would expect the "Misspelling of khaki" sense to be a noun on occasion, with "in the khaki" referring to some type of military dress being entirely possible. I'm sure you're talking about a different context, but it might give a few false positives in Google searches. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:51, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

касерола
Where does the stress go on the Bulgarian word касерола? Thanks SimonWikt (talk) 20:46, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @Chernorizets @Kiril kovachev Can you respond? I looked up this word in RBE and Chitanka but couldn't find it. I could guess касеро́ла based on the stress in French and Spanish but that's just a guess. Benwing2 (talk) 19:27, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Benwing2 That sounds right to me. https://youtu.be/HlXZ_JePxiY?t=38 and https://youtu.be/dBZlbaFeKnI?t=2 for usage in the wild. This is a very rare word to me, so that would explain why we can't find it in the dictionaries. In these apocryphal cases, I think really the only option to know its stress is to check for any audio uses, which I generally search YouTube/Facebook for. Unfortunately, besides just a few clear pronunciations, there isn't an obvious and authoritative source for the accent; many uses are also uncommentated and just write the word in text... @SimonWikt Hope this helps :) Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 19:52, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Kiril kovachev @Benwing2 Thanks, I was trying to find the Bulgarian word for saucepan (a pan, for cooking, on a stove, with one handle and possibly a lid) and this word kept showing up on all the kitchen shopping sites. Does anyone object to me adding it without dictionary references, or can someone suggest a better alternative? SimonWikt (talk) 20:03, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @SimonWikt Why don't we be the first to document it? I'm all for, anyway. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 20:06, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Kiril kovachev касерола entry created :) Needs etymology and references :) SimonWikt (talk) 21:09, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @SimonWikt Nice one! I don't know what source we can really find on this word, but we can try at least. One can obviously tell that the word is cognate with 🇨🇬, and should mean roughly the same, and tracing back that etymology gives that basically all other-language versions of this word stem from French. Although a borrowing from French is certainly possible for Bulgarian, I think the phonetic similarity lends more credence to a borrowing from 🇨🇬, which sounds almost identical to the Bulgarian. Even a borrowing from English is possible, but given that this word isn't restricted to English, and has counterparts in many other European languages, I think it's not as likely. English words in Bulgarian are mostly words that originated in English, like benchmark or backboard or whatever. As far as the etymology goes, I think this is as good as I can do; but of course there's no source for this at all... I think it's not so risky to suggest a borrowing from either German or French, though. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 21:38, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Also, we should note that the 🇨🇬 is from at least 1846, according to Trésor de la langue française informatisé, so the German sense would have plenty of time to be borrowed, and then the Bulgarian would still have plenty of time to be borrowed from German, so the timeline probably also works out for this estimation. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 21:43, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Kiril kovachev It seems like it should mean the same as casserole but when searching Google images for касерола the results are definitely saucepans and not casseroles. When searching for тенджера you get cooking pots and casseroles. In the senses I was going for actual usage rather then what it sounds like it should be!
 * User @Fenakhay is joining in as well, changing the entries!
 * SimonWikt (talk) SimonWikt (talk) 21:45, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It is better to be on the safe side by listing only in the etymology and leaving  whenever there is some materials on its origin. — Fenakhay ( حيطي · مساهماتي ) 21:50, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Fenakhay Thanks for explaining, I couldn't tell from your edit what the intention was, but that makes sense, it's probably more sensible not to put speculative things in there if we don't know them for sure. Unfortunately, I can't see this happening anywhere in the future, because the only real work on Bulgarian etymology has already finished documented words with К, so they probably won't ever document it. (And they didn't cover it the first time round, https://ibl.bas.bg/lib/ber_2_000-744/#page/264/mode/1up lacks an entry for it.) That leaves us with no known candidates for proper sources, so at most we might get an article or something that describes it. The rest would at most have to be our original research. Would it perhaps serve to write in the German as a cognate or something? Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 22:00, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @SimonWikt I guess it kind of does mean the same as casserole, as in a "saucepan", but I didn't know until today that it meant that, either...! I thought it just meant a type of dish, a food, basically, so this was quite surprising. Strictly, I guess the "pot" sense is really what a casserole is, and the meal is just named like that because it's made and maybe served in a casserole. So it makes sense that the Bulgarian also means a pot, rather than a dish... but then again, I wonder if it can still mean a dish; I saw a video of a lady making a "лазанч кацероле", but I can't tell what language that's meant to be from, nor whether this support that means a dish or not. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 21:52, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The final vowel in the Bulgarian word makes both English and French unlikely as the immediate source of the word, and the semantics makes English doubly unlikely: in English, a casserole is generally a glass or ceramic baking dish with high sides and no handle- I've never heard anyone refer to a saucepan as a casserole. Usually, though, the word refers to the type of food typically cooked or served in a casserole rather than the baking dish itself. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:31, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Chuck Entz I am not sure the final -а makes it unlikely to be a direct French borrowing; the French word is feminine and I can easily see it being adapted to the feminine gender upon borrowing by adding -а. Same story for borrowing from German (but not English). Benwing2 (talk) 00:18, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Benwing2 @Chuck Entz @Kiril kovachev @Fenakhay
 * If it comes ultimately from French then it acquired an -a on the way to Bulgaria. The Italian, Greek, Romanian and Russian translations all have an 'a' sound at the end. It would also seem that the meaning has also changed along the way and the usage on Bulgarian Kitchenware sites is predominately 'saucepan' and not 'casserole dish/pot'.
 * SimonWikt (talk) 07:50, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @SimonWikt I see this as well, it does look only like a saucepan, not really like the ceramic dish we have on the current casserole page at all; but I think our English definition for casserole might not be exactly all-encompassing, because I'm looking up "casserole cookware" in English and seeing a lot of saucepan-type cookware. So maybe the Bulgarian still qualifies under the English definition? In any case, you're right, I put the most prominent definition back to "saucepan" like you put it originally. Kiril kovachev (talk・contribs) 10:45, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @SimonWikt I hadn't heard of that word until today :-) We say тенджера, with qualifiers like тенджера под налягане (pressure cooker), etc. Having searched online, касерола is essentially тенджера с дръжка, but yes - the word does exist, as seen on the blog of this cookware store. Chernorizets (talk) 22:02, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Actuarial notation
Hello I'm working on adding senses to our translingual entries. There's a couple of things I would like to get some input from the community before proceeding to add more. – Wpi (talk) 11:21, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * 1) The notation usually involves a lot of subscripts/superscripts. I've opted to only add the main (non-subscripted/superscripted) letters, and treat the entire expression as an ux (see for example a or ä). This should be inline with our treatment of, say the diaritics in IPA, but I'd want to see if there are other better ways to deal with them.
 * 2) The annuity bracket (not sure about its name) is a commonly used symbol to denote the length of an annuity or insurance. The symbol is encoded in Unicode as ◌⃧  (U+20E7) (and not supported in LaTeX without extensions), but it is difficult to type normally, so this is often replaced by an overline on the length and then followed by a vertical bar. (Even Wikipedia's article uses this alternative) Should we use the correct symbols at the expense of using less common variants?
 * 3) There are other brackets and symbols used in the superscript/subscript parts (e.g. the $(m)$ part in $$a_{\overline{n|}}^{(m)}$$), how could these be dealt with?
 * 4) The letters used are (mostly) standardized, so e.g. $x$ is always the age of a person, $i$ is the annual effective interest rate, $d$ is the annual effective discount rate. Should these be added?
 * 5) I know there are Appendix:Superscript and Appendix:Subscript, but how should one distinguish between a superscript (or subscript) appearing before and after the letter? The two serve different purposes in actuarial notation.
 * 6) Where should one add to Module:labels/data so that mul automatically links to the relevant Wikipedia article? But only enabled for translingual since actuarial notation is strictly translingual, unlike mul etc.


 * @Wpi The answer to your last question is Module:labels/data/lang/mul. This doesn't exist currently so you need to create it based on an existing lang-specific module and add "mul" to the list of languages in Module:labels/data/lang. Benwing2 (talk) 19:33, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

catalogue
What is meant to be the difference between the following senses of catalogue as a verb? 1. To put into a catalogue.

3. To add items (e.g. books) to an existing catalogue. These senses (which date back to the initial page creation) strike me as prime candidates for merger, but I just want to check that I'm not missing something here that warrants their separation. Is sense 3 meant to be intransitive? May they be referring to different (but unspecified) types of catalogue? The translation boxes for these senses have largely the same content (with the exception of Maori whakarārangi for sense 1, whakaputumōhio for sense 3. Are there any Maori speakers here who can elucidate the difference?) Voltaigne (talk) 16:32, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

decadent, decadence
Our first sense of decadence is "a state of moral or artistic decline or deterioration; decay" (and similar for decadent). Does this need a label? I don't know if I've ever encountered this sense before reading a poorly translated Brazilian novel (overly reliant on cognates that are barely used in English). I imagine it's dated or formal.

Also, I think we should change translations such as 🇨🇬, whose only definition is just "decadence". Most English speakers will come across these translations and understand it as the second sense, "luxurious self-indulgence", which is probably wrong for most languages. I once described an elaborate sandwich as "decadente" in Spanish and ended up having to explain myself before settling on. Word Reference for Spanish-English gives "decline", "downward spiral", "freefall", "fall", and "decay" all before "decadence", which they label as formal. Ultimateria (talk) 17:23, 18 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I don't think the decline/deterioration sense (as opposed to luxurious self-indulgence, the other one) is dated or markedly formal at all, I've heard it frequently. Here are some recent newspaper headline uses from a quick Google:, , , . —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 17:29, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Agreed. The decline/deterioration sense is current, widely understood in contexts such as "the decadence of modern society", and not especially formal. Voltaigne (talk) 17:52, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * mostly shows dictionaries having only our first sense, sometimes including our second sense as a specific indication of the deterioration. Some dictionaries have two definitions, one for a process of decline, another for a result of the process. DCDuring (talk) 20:02, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * No, it means the Spanish needs a label, and the translation table a review. The German has both senses with both expected anywhere. Fay Freak (talk) 17:31, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * 🇨🇬 is a bit more informative now. Voltaigne (talk) 18:44, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I guess I was way off base with the usage note suggestion. I've added glosses to translations of decadent and decadence for Romance languages based on Voltaigne's edit. Ultimateria (talk) 16:30, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Pronunciation of Joachim
Pronunciations of this on the internet seem to be all over the map. I have almost always heard this pronounced as described in the entry, but lately, I've also been hearing people (and somewhat surprisingly, mostly those less familiar with the name) pronouncing it /joʊ.kɪm/. I'm fairly certain the /j/ form is a legitimate and relatively common pronunciation in English, but based on what I found online, I'm thinking there might be several variations (with both /j/ and /d͡ʒ/) worth including. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:05, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I imagine partly it's because of relatively famous Europeans with the name like the Premier League player Joachim Andersen, pronounced with /j/. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:44, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, /joʊ.kɪm/ sounds fine to me, so does /joʊ.ǝ.ˈkiːm/ maybe because I'm instinctively foreignizing my pronunciation of a patently foreign word. Benwing2 (talk) 19:36, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * How do my qualifiers look? I'm sure I've seen better one's elsewhere, but I can't recall the wording. Also, in my search, I added a pronunciation and (different) qualifiers at . Not sure if there was a better choice of words. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:26, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * They look good to me. Benwing2 (talk) 04:31, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, great, thanks. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:36, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Doublets in Far West
"Par Vêpre" and "Per Vespro" were put as doublets for the french and the italian entry respectively. Do these really count as doublets ? They clearly don't really seem to exist as words or fixed phrases in either language and even if they did they would probably just be unrelated formations that happen to contain the cognates for "far" and "west". Am I missing something ? Kxilan (talk) 14:18, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I think even if they were lexicalised the sentiment is that calques should not be listed as doublets of non-calque borrowings/inheritances. pointed this out to me when I listed English  (borrowing) and  (calque) as doublets, which I self-reverted. Compare also  and . (Also unless I'm missing something too, par and per don't mean "far" anyway so this seems like nonsense? I've removed them.) —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 14:21, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes both words don't have the same meaning as in English at all in French and Italian. Thanks for removing. Kxilan (talk) 14:37, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Numerical definitions
, as a numeral, is said to have four senses:
 * 1) The  represented by the  ; the numerical value equal to that cardinal number.
 * 2)  The    in the set of.
 * 3)  The  of the smallest  set.
 * 4)  The  of an element which has no, usually called ' or '.

Then the numbers from to  as well as  and  have two definitions, with the second being:

Should these senses (the ones other than the basic "cardinal number" sense) be kept? If so, we should apply them to all of our number entries. Ioaxxere (talk) 22:35, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I would these, as how a "numeral" can be used seems to just be grammatical. Ioaxxere (talk) 22:37, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * For the describing a group sense: keep IMO, clear difference between the number itself as a concept and the numerical determiner. For the "one" ones, I don't know, but I would just point out that a significant part of my effort here is spent on splitting, merging and otherwise cleaning up bad senses from non-experts in the fields I do know about, so we might want someone who does know what they're talking about to chime in first (?). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:39, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The above definitions for are roughly synonymous, as they are just different mathematical definitions for what is in the end the same concept (if we ignore the differences between cardinality and ordinality, anyway; if we don't, the ordinality sense corresponds to the number as an abstract concept and the cardinality sense to the "group or set" sense, while the number theory sense could be considered as either but would probably fall closer to the former). I suppose one could argue that these should be kept, but only as subsenses, not as independent senses. &mdash; S URJECTION  / T / C / L / 22:47, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, we can probably get rid of the "one" senses then. The abstract number and the cardinality (that is, "describing a group" etc) do seem substantively different to me, both conceptually and syntactically, so I feel that distinction is worth keeping as standard. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:49, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Not an expert, but these senses seem to be defining the same thing, but in different ways, as though we were to define water as stuff (i) falling from the sky and (ii) welling up from underground. Equinox ◑ 22:44, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * He's not as active lately, but pinging User:Msh210 (another of our resident math people) if he has anything to add. Offhand, having subsenses for any which are truly distinct in maths seems more tolerable than separate "top-level" senses, for cases of "different ways of analysing 1", but I'd definitely want to avoid oversplitting like this, where "the definition of iron (Fe) as intelligible to laymen" and "the definition of iron (Fe) as intelligible to chemists" were put as separate defs (later fixed here)! - -sche (discuss) 23:01, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the ping. We currently have as definition 1 "A numerical value equal to 2; this many dots (••)", and as definition 2 "Describing a set or group with two elements". If the "numerical value" is different from the "describing a set", then surely "this may dots" should go with the latter, not with the former! "This many dots" precisely describes a set with two elements. I don't see a difference, myself, between the two ===Numeral=== definitions, and think we can get rid of the second. See also [[talk:one]]. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 20:08, 21 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I would just point out that every full (i.e., not learners') dictionary I've checked does distinguish between the numerical value and the cardinality: among other senses, for two as a noun,
 * Merriam-Webster has "a number that is one more than one" and "something having two units or members"
 * The OED has "the abstract number equal to one and one" and "a group or set of two persons or things" (as distinct senses, not just subsenses, and with separate defdates)
 * Collins has "the cardinal number that is the sum of one and one" and "something representing, represented by, or consisting of two units"
 * American Heritage has "The cardinal number equal to the sum of 1 + 1" and "something having two parts, units, or members"
 * Dictionary.com has "a cardinal number, 1 plus 1" and "a set of this many persons or things"
 * So, if we're treating this as a general RFD-sense, there are plenty of lemmings to appeal to. Like I said these seem clearly distinct to me so I'm surprised others don't perceive them as such. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:22, 21 August 2023 (UTC)


 * We have separate Numeral and Noun sections, which those dictionaries might not. Equinox ◑ 20:25, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * That sort of just raises the question of what exactly the Numeral POS means. But then another consideration along those lines is that, for three for example, there are synonyms that are used in counting, i.e. as the abstract value, but not used as determiners, i.e. as the cardinality of a set. These are currently marked appropriately as belonging to a particular sense. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:28, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * (Also on POS: The abstract number is always going to be nominal, at least in a natural sentence. If "Numeral" means "numerical determiner", as it usually does, then it would make sense for the preserved definition to be one about number of things in a set, and the abstract number to be moved to the noun. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:35, 21 August 2023 (UTC))
 * I agree that we should follow other dictionaries on this. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 20:41, 21 August 2023 (UTC)


 * So you would agree, then, that perhaps the problem here is a lack of understanding about the difference between Numeral and Noun. (Particularly funny because I would grammatically analyse it in most cases as a Determiner.) Since we have any number (HHAHA JOKE) of such entries, shall we start a formal discussion? Equinox ◑ 13:16, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I think any number can function as a determiner (of the quantifier variety), starting with zero ("no") and one ("a"). That any number can so function means to me that we do not necessarily need to have a Determiner PoS section. OTOH, maybe numerals are never adjectives, in which case it would be possible to have a Determiner PoS section and no Adjective PoS (but many dictionaries have an adjective definition for the numbers they include). Surprisingly, some dictionaries only have the PoS noun for the numbers they define. I don't think they mean to imply that any use 'modifying' another noun is attributive use of the number. If we could adequately define one we wouldn't need to claim that any of the various mathematical predicates from number theory etc. that can follow one in a sentence are definitions. DCDuring (talk) 15:21, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
 * My take is that as long as we have "Numeral" as a POS header we don't need to change it to "Determiner", it's just worth having a clear idea of what numeral is supposed to mean specifically for English when we also have a "Noun" header for numbers. To me it probably makes sense, as a standard, to treat numerals in English as an extension of determiners and to move the abstract integer sense to "Noun".
 * So things like "there are two birds", "two dimensions" (both grammatically analysable as determiners), "two came yesterday" (pronominal), "I count two of them" (determiner, compare "a lot of"), "one, two, three" (could be read as pronominal, compare "this, that", "you, me"), are all numeral uses, and "the square of two is four", "two is the smallest even natural number", etc., constitutes a separate noun use. For the number theory etc. stuff: it seems like the mathematicians here don't think it's necessary to preserve those senses, though it's my understanding that they are or can be definitions within a system of axioms ("let 1 be...") rather than predicates ("1 is..."). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:02, 8 September 2023 (UTC)


 * In that case, where can I read some text on Wiktionary that explains to me the difference between a Determiner and a Numeral? If we don't have it, we should. (I don't dispute the Noun, by the way. That's separate.) Equinox ◑ 17:46, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
 * There might be something in an archived RfD or TR or even BP or RfV discussion somewhere. I would find the relevant pages in CGEL 2005. DCDuring (talk) 18:43, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

yaffling irons, hoofing
British Royal Marine slang, mentioned here, some cites at Citations:yaffling irons (syn. of eating irons) and Citations:hoofing if anyone wants to find a few more cites and add the entries. - -sche (discuss) 22:49, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

floor
I hear people in and around Manchester using the word to simply mean, as in "He dropped it on the floor", when clearly the person is outdoors. We already have this at sense 2, but that sense is specific and carries a biology labelling. I'd like to add this regional sense, but I'm unsure whether I should add it to the existing one at 2, creating a label of biology, dialectal, which looks odd to me. Or should I add a separate sense for this usage ? Leasnam (talk) 23:41, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I would add a separate sense, with the label dialectal or nonstandard, and make the biology sense more specific, because I don't think it's accurate. I don't think you'd talk about the "floor" in biology apart from any qualifier, or even with certain qualifiers. Could you say "savannah floor"? "Arctic floor"? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:53, 19 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The biology sense was generic "ground" until I changed it; see entry history. Equinox ◑ 23:54, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Perhaps we can change sense 2 to imitate sense 1 in that it is the "bottom surface" of a natural structure or entity, such as a cave, forest, ocean, etc. ? The term desert floor does exist. Leasnam (talk) 02:56, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't really see it as nonstandard, as it's informal; maybe dialectal. Theknightwho (talk) 13:11, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I've caught myself using it to mean ground in the past. Dunno if it's a BrE thing. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 14:11, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I merged former sense 3 ["The lower inside surface of a hollow space."] into sense 2, and added a new sense 3. Please check. Leasnam (talk) 04:35, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Looks good to me. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 15:42, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I happened upon two examples today: here, at 6:15, a blind pilot from Milton Keynes (now living in Birmingham) asks her copilot what people on the "floor" (ground) look like. And here, at 4:42 an American character putting his sleeping bag directly on the dirt rather than in a tent says he's just going to sleep on the "floor", but another character immediately corrects him that it's called the ground when outdoors, and overall that use of floor seems more like a joke. - -sche (discuss) 18:54, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

The Proto-Germanic lemmas for the Icelandic words for "cell" -fruma, klefi, & fangelsis- in fangelsisklefi.
Icelandic has avoided using words of Latin and Greek origin for the biological term "cell", and has instituted fruma, klefi, and fangelsisklefi, apparently of Germanic origin. My question is that do these Germanic roots exist in the West Germanic Branch, and did they survive into Old English, and if not, what would the Old English Lemmas be ? BmoreKid (talk) 01:23, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The first one looks like it should be from something related to "first" or "beginning". The other two look like terms for prison/jail cells, not biological cells. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:04, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Poissonier isn’t a French word
poissonier isn’t a French word. It’s poissonnier. Somebody should check if the English word really lost the second N or if the whole entry is wrong and if the definitions should be added to the correct entry. 2A01:E0A:174:BF81:890B:DAFB:8417:627C 14:00, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I've removed the French section. PUC – 14:03, 20 August 2023 (UTC)


 * In English, both spellings seem to be about equally uncommon, so I'd go ahead and move the main English entry to the nn form to match the French, where of course nn predominates (although a few older works have n). - -sche (discuss) 16:18, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I can indeed find some hits for poissonier(s), but it's a completely obsolete spelling (possibly Middle French, even). PUC – 16:28, 20 August 2023 (UTC)


 * ✅ Moved main English entry to French spelling. Equinox ◑ 17:17, 21 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The Collins English/French Dictionary only has an entry for 'poissonnier', however the two spelling do seem to exist, with 'poissonier' being translated to 'fishmonger' or 'fish merchant', and the word 'poissonier' is used on English language websites to refer to a 'fish chef' SimonWikt (talk) 18:38, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I have subsequently found some culinary web sites where the fish chef is referred to as a 'poissonnier' so the version with one 'n' could well be a misspelling! SimonWikt (talk) 18:43, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

English equivalent of Hungarian kroki
Kroki is a short, often witty, critical, provocative or otherwise exaggerating newspaper article. I took the definition from the cited Hungarian monolingual dictionaries. Another editor added skit as an English equivalent, but for me – though not being a native speaker – that seems more to be a small theatrical act, but not really a newspaper article. Please help us out, and decide who is right! Drkazmer (talk) 15:06, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree it does not correspond to that specific definition. Skit can refer to satirical writing as well—though this is arguably dated, the OED's citations are 19th-century and in recent usage "write a skit" virtually always refers to writing something to be acted out. But that gloss does not seem to correspond specifically to satirical writing either. There's also nothing specifically journalistic about "skit", which I think is part of the definition of kroki. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 15:30, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * skit is definitely a performance, not a newspaper column. In UK journalism a sketch is "A humorous newspaper article summarizing political events, making heavy use of metaphor, paraphrase and caricature". Also the word squib can mean "A short piece of witty writing; a lampoon", but is rightly labelled as dated. Voltaigne (talk) 18:15, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I suppose these two match kroki. @Panda10 It seems that we should rework this, but we should mark the UK usage and the datedness. Drkazmer (talk) 08:05, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The above is good information, please feel free to incorporate it in the entry as you see best. BTW, an editor has already removed skit based on these comments. Panda10 (talk) 17:02, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I've added these two to the definition, but I'd much appreciate if you could check it, as I'm not familiar with these templates. Drkazmer (talk) 09:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It looks good to me. Panda10 (talk) 17:12, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

irländsk julafton
Based on the description, is the game irländsk julafton similar or identical to dizzy bat and dizzy izzy? Can an English speaking person please confirm or perhaps give a better example? --Christoffre (talk) 16:46, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I think it's the same, yes. Both of those were redlinks when you posted this, and at least two of us saw the opportunity to create pages for them .... I think it's a fairly common children's game, sometimes even played by adults to release stress, and that it is much the same across the world. Any minor rule variations are likely to be due to circumstances of the players (e.g. three-year-olds might have a difficult time just managing to walk after spinning around), rather than separate games. — Soap — 17:00, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the help --Christoffre (talk) 11:10, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

someone who wears heavy clothes on top and shorts on the bottom
I remember seeing a Japanese word for someone who wears thick clothes on the top half of their body while wearing shorts, particularly very short shorts, underneath. The word was gender-neutral though i get the impression most are young women. Ive looked through all the English-language lists of Japanese slang I could find (I wouldnt understand it if it was defined in Japanese) but couldnt turn this up. Is anyone here familiar with the word I saw? I'd also be interested in a corresponding word in other languages ... its possible there's even a term for it in English that Im not familiar with. Thanks, — Soap — 17:01, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

pais
We say pais is "The people from among whom a jury is chosen", used "only in phrases trial per pais and matter in pais". However, I find phrases like, and even spot a few like "from the pais", so we should drop the supposed restriction to just two phrases. And I wonder if it should be redefined as the place from which the people who would make up a jury are chosen? But Dictionary.com has in pais as "outside of court; without legal proceedings"; is that using the same sense of pais, or a separate usage we're missing? - -sche (discuss) 18:44, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The entry was originally imported from Webster 1913, which says: "(O[ld] E[nglish] Law) The country; the people of the neighborhood. ☞ A trial per pais is a trial by the country, that is, by a jury; and matter in pais is matter triable by the country, or jury." It does not claim it's only used in those phrases. Meanwhile, the present OED has separate entries in pais ("in or within the country; relating to or designating actions, matters, etc., which are legally recognized despite not being formally recorded or performed") and per pais ("before or by one's fellow countrymen, esp. as represented by a jury"). At any rate the Wiktionary gloss appears to be wrong. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:13, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I revised the entry a little. Perhaps User:BD2412 or User:Theknightwho has relevant knowledge or law-dictionaries. - -sche (discuss) 19:49, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The 1910 Black's Law says: PAIS, PAYS. Fr. The country: the neighborhood. A trial per pais signifies a trial by the country; that is, by jury. An assurance by matter in pais is an assurance transacted between two or more private persons in the country;" that is, upon the very spot to be transferred. Matter in pais signifies matters of fact, probably because matters of fact are triable by the country: i.e., by jury; estoppels in pais are estoppels by conduct, as distinguished from estoppels in deed or by record.
 * That does indeed seem to reflect "the place". bd2412 T 20:01, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

πόρνη
Greek definition 2: does πόρνη mean "opprobrious designation" (i.e. you could translate a word like "slur" into Greek as "πόρνη") or should this be italicized as a non-gloss definition? I'm guessing it's the latter, but. - -sche (discuss) 16:54, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, - -sche, I do not know the word opprobrious. Probably 2. not needed from 2010, and I currrently work only for Medieval Greek at wiktionaries. &#8209;&#8209;Sarri.greek &#9835; I 21:06, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * As a quasi-native speaker of Latin and other dated chronolects of Europe I do know: In everyday English this is equivalent to: . Fay Freak (talk) 21:16, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It seems unlikely to me that this would mean that. I think it is indeed a non-gloss definition and should be presented as such. FWIW, that's what the Greek wiktionary does, see the second (italicized) sense there: υβριστικός χαρακτηρισμός. PUC – 12:38, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks, all; I've italicized it. - -sche (discuss) 14:12, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

shortchange
I can't find sense 3 in other dictionaries and I'm not sure of its possible range of usage, so adding a few supporting quotes would be nice. Sense 2 also had a definition and usage example that I found rather strange, so I it with a more general def and added a quote; I would appreciate it if someone could check whether my edit was appropriate. Einstein2 (talk) 19:26, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I restored the 2nd sense usex but I think your gloss is better. The usex just means they paid for the degree so in the end they're just cheating themselves by taking easy courses. There could be another usex for that sense, but I think it's a helpful one since it illustrates how it can apply to cheating in a broader sense than just defrauding other people. The usex for the third sense on the other hand is flagrantly bizarre and I'm not familiar with the sense, though it's worth noting the usex was added much later than the sense. I can see some uses that look like they might count: "Provide excellence at all costs; never shortchange the product", "If you've shortchanged the product in the past and incurred technical debt, the historical information is only a starting point" . —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:05, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Franco-Italian language?
I am trying to add a parameter for the original language of Il Milione aka by. It is claimed to be, which I have never heard of but which has a Wikipedia entry. Do we have a code for this language and if so, what is it? If not, should be add it (somehow or other)? Benwing2 (talk) 00:32, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I don't believe we have a corresponding language code. I certainly wouldn't oppose creating one.
 * Incidentally, there appears to also have been a literary around that time. I wonder what the relation between the two was. Nicodene (talk) 00:59, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * On one hand, it seems suboptimal to create a situation where a statement by e.g. a Ligurian or a Florentine is variously either ==Ligurian== or ==Franco-Italian== or ==Italian== depending on which orthographic/writing standard s/he wrote it down in. (It feels like we're very splittist with European lects, even as we're content to lump e.g. the Akans, or Fulas — or Chineses.) On the other hand, it's a closed corpus, and having one header for words written in that standard could be tidier than having to disperse them between Ligurian, Lombard, etc. Meh; I don't oppose creating it. - -sche (discuss) 03:25, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @-sche Can you explain further? I can't find examples of Franco-Italian so I don't know what this language looks like, but maybe it can be an etymology-only language of some other language (I don't know which one)? Benwing2 (talk) 03:39, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * AFAICT, "Franco-Italian" is a written standard, a norm for writing the various spoken languages of the northern Italian area, for which over time other written standards also became available, like ==Italian== and, for e.g. Ligurian texts, ==Ligurian== (etc). This is probably why at least a few references consider "Franco-Italian" works to just belong directly to those languages, or even to French, which is the language some texts' authors apparently considered their texts to be in. If we were talking about living languages with two contemporaneous standards, I suspect we'd probably not have separate codes, or at least not separate L2s: e.g. the Portuguese-y Reintegrationist written standard for Galician and the Isolationist standard are both ==Galician==. (OTOH, Norwegian.) Since we're talking about a long dead written standard, a closed corpus, it wouldn't be as much of an issue if we treated it as a separate code and/or L2, and it might simplify cases where a text is written in the Franco-Italian / Franco-Venetian standard but we don't know which side of the border or which area (Ligurian, etc) the author was from and don't feel like assigning it to ==Italian== or another L2. I would defer to Romance editors if they want a separate code. (In some ways, this feels similar to the discussion of .) This is somewhat off topic, but I wonder if we should rename "etymology languages" (and the associated module, etc), because especially if we're creating an "etymology language" code to use to indicate the language of a text in templated quotations of that text, well, that's another case where what we seem to mean by "etymology language" is no longer just "codes for use in etymologies" but is more like "codes that are subsumed under other codes' L2s". So maybe it should be renamed something like "Language variants" or "Subsumed language variants" or something. - -sche (discuss) 20:57, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @Benwing2 I'd be careful about adding a language code for Franco-Italian. of the "prominent masterpieces" listed on that Wikipedia article is described as being in Old French in its own article. The other two are described in their own articles as being in "Franco-Venetian", which has a redirect to Franco-Italian. We should look for sources beyond Wikipedia to establish whether that's really a "language" that existed, or a literary device. For example, I remember from my time in chamber choir that it was common for Romance-speaking songwriters in early Renaissance and pre-Renaissance Europe to "mash together" their languages, sometimes for comedic effect. Mutual comprehension would've been higher back then, making such mashups easier. Chernorizets (talk) 09:06, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Also FWIW both French and Italian Wikipedia render this putative language as Franco-Venetian. Chernorizets (talk) 09:14, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * FWIW, isn't saying the Song of Roland was only ever written in Franco-Italian, it says some editions of it were (there's also one in German); others are of course French. - -sche (discuss) 20:57, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

You should not forget that even know the dialects in Southeastern France and Northwestern Italy form a kind of continuum. If you compare Monégasque, Ligurian, Piedmontese or Lombard, you'll find surprising similarities both in vocabulary and in phonology. I assume that back then these differences were even smaller. Drkazmer (talk) 09:35, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

A bunch of -ative "words"
Special:Contributions/Vuccala has just been adding a lot of "-ative" words that mostly or entirely seem like mere errors: combatative, attributative, negatative (!!), additative, and more. (I've deleted some that weren't even defined properly.) Anyway I don't think the "suffixed with -ative" category is right either, since these are apparently typos like "bananana" for "banana". Not real morphology. Other eyes welcome. Equinox ◑ 01:06, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The most-attested of the 9 pages I created was combatative at 900. On the lower end were ones like abortative with 37 attestations though in mostly professional publications. – Vuccala (talk) 02:03, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I guess we need to check how often texts that use these also use the 'expected'/shorter forms in other places or in other editions; some of these (like combatative) seem like they may be valid old alternative formations; others could be non-native speakers' errors (thinking there's supposed to be an extra -at-); and as you say, some seem like they could be unintentional typoes like recondit ion  ing, licenc is e. - -sche (discuss) 02:08, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Personally I'd prefer not to include these. If we go down this route there are a zillion more misspellings and typos that could be entered and clog up the categories. 37 attestations for a misspelling is way too few; even 900 seems not much. Benwing2 (talk) 03:44, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Contrast definately with 13,919 in the same corpus and reccommend (not in Wiktionary) with 7,233. Benwing2 (talk) 03:46, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * "Additative" looks very common, has a long citation history (at least 1850s) and does not even sound particularly odd to me, definitely not rare. Many of the others are more dubious, though in most cases I don't see much evidence that they are primarily from non-native speakers as -sche suggests. In some cases these forms seem to be motivated by distinguishing a more specific meaning from the common -ive words, so "abortative" seems to primarily be used in reference to abortifacients. In general anyway if these words are to be considered nonstandard they're misconstructions, and should use misconstruction of, not misspellings. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:24, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, these will have to be evaluated individually. Works that use abortative seem to almost never use abortive (, and the results on archive.org are similar), suggesting it's used intentionally and consistently, and it has a clear rationale behind it as you say, so it seems like abortative is a valid separate word from abortive. Enough works that use combatative also use combative that it seems to be sometimes an unintentional error, but the references specifically proscribing it on Talk:combatative do suggest other people spell it that way intentionally (since I would not expect to see references chiding people about things like "it's spelled Germany, not Gemrany!" where everyone knows that it only occurs unintentionally and no-one thinks Gemrany is how it's spelled), so it seems like it could have an entry with a en label. Additative is probably a valid (?)alt-form as you say (only a few works mix ). Whereas negatative seems like a rare error, several of the few hits at Google Books look to be by non-native speakers, and most of hits that use it also use negative, so it seems like a rare, unintentional error, the kind of thing we'd probably delete. - -sche (discuss) 17:05, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I did a search for combatative last night when I saw this because it jumped out at me as being etymologically well-grounded (the -at- in combat is not the Latin verb ending), and the Maine bug guide which we list as the first cite uses it spelled that way three times, so it's at least clearly not a typo. But I realized it would be difficult to turn up three independent cites in which it was clear all three times that it was intentional, so I didnt say anything.  I wont forget about this, though. — Soap — 17:33, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * "Combatative" actually seems to be about the same age as "combative". The OED's earliest citation for combative is 1834, and I can find combatative used in an 1835 book: . Google Books hits push combative back a bit, to the 1820s, but not much (there are a lot of misdated hits). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:04, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

From what I can tell: "Combatative" is by far the most convincing and I've edited it accordingly with extra cites. "Abortative" could probably be re-created. "Alternatative" and "negatative" I would get rid of as rare errors, the others I would keep as misconstructions. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:13, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * abortative: There are a few cases where it appears to just be a misconstruction of abortive, but as mentioned above the fact the attestations are largely about abortifacients—which as the entry for says is rare for that word anyway—suggests it should be understood as specifically intended to distinguish that meaning.
 * additative: I think a misconstruction. There's sustained use, especially in the sciences, but it's obviously very rare compared to additive and not much to suggest it's intended as anything specific.
 * affectative: Misconstruction. Used rarely, nothing particularly convincing.
 * alternatative: Appears to just be a printing error with the repetition of . A lot of the attestations are for the noun (oddly for -ative), and some are verifiably mistakes (e.g. wrong titles in references).
 * attributative: Misconstruction. It has a mid-18th-century attestation and a handful of JSTOR hits, but there's nothing special about them.
 * combatative: An alternative form that lost out on becoming the accepted one. Coined about the same time as combative, widely attested in plenty of reputable books and academic journals starting with Mary Shelley who may have originated it.
 * negatative: Grab bag of obvious errors ("determined in the negatative", bad hyphenation at the end of a line, etc.), scan errors for "vegetative", nothing convincing. Like "alternatative", probably a printing error with  repetition.

bog deposition
None of the current senses of are a great fit for the use as in bog deposition, the placing of object or (until recently) living creatures in a bog as a sacrifice to a god, a ritual practice performed by Celtic and Germanic peoples and perhaps others too. The religious sense comes closest, but its specifically Christian definition (so perhaps its label should be more specific) makes it a rather odd fit. Should that definition be broadened or would it be better to add a new one? ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk)  14:19, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I don't think the Christian practice has any relation to what you're describing. I would create a separate sense and relabel the current one. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 15:41, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * "Bog deposition" sounds like a term only used by anthropologists, not by, say, practitioners. DCDuring (talk) 21:21, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Just create an entry for bog disposition, dude Thatdon&#39;t grammar (talk) 21:27, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Though it seems likely SoP when used in that context. DCDuring (talk) 12:57, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * What, it's not sworn testimony recorded in a loo? ;p Chuck Entz (talk) 14:11, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Def. 2 "The act of depositing material, especially by a natural process; the resultant deposit." would seem to fit the bill, but the "especially" phrase seems to hijack a users attention away from the base definition. DCDuring (talk) 18:22, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Contradictory connotations: diary vs. journal
I've been trying to decide which is the best word to use in reference to a man's brief, daily notes about the events of his day. My initial thought was that "journal" was the more suitable word, being more neutral and favouring entries that are more objective, with "diary" having the possible connotations of being the sort of thing a teenage girl might write, with "Dear Diary" type entries and flowery reflections on her feelings. However, when I looked up the words online, I discovered that most articles described the exact opposite: "journal" is preferable for a book with more personal, embellished writing, whereas "diary" is more suitable for describing a book with short, factual entries. This Reddit thread gives evidence for different people viewing the words in similarly contradictory ways: https://www.reddit.com/r/Journaling/comments/110p0bd/is_there_a_difference_between_a_journal_and_a/

Is this a pondian difference? A generational one? I think we should indicate these connotations in a usage note, but I would like to have more information to go on first. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 21:27, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I would have gone with your initial thought. For example journal is used to describe records of business transactions and events (not just accounting). Log, day book, diary, and journal are mutually synonymous in at least one of their definitions, but with different usage contexts and connotations. discusses aspects of usage. The use of journaling as a part of some kinds of therapy may have shifted the connotations of journal closer to those of diary. DCDuring (talk) 18:37, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

infectious: another sense?

 * Causing something to spread quickly from one person to another.

(“Something” is “that spirit”.) J3133 (talk) 05:52, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

monster
Our listed U.S. pronunciation has /mɑn/, but the U.S. audio file has /mʌn/. 81.5.42.102 11:56, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I highly doubt it is phonetically /mʌn/. /ɑ/ and /ʌ/ are realised differently in different American accents, and some of those realisations of /ɑ/ will sound closer to /ʌ/ out of context to speakers of other dialects, though they're still distinguished within the same lect. I know GenAm IPA has been much-litigated, but that's my basic understanding. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:34, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah. It's not the best audio (replacing it with a better recording would be ideal, it does sound a little too much like Munster), but it seems to be more an aberrant [narrow] realization than actually a different /phoneme/. - -sche (discuss) 18:58, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I’d say that it’s phonetically and arguably phonemically  in this audio. Some Black Country speakers even say ! --Overlordnat1 (talk) 19:21, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree that we should add another, more standard recording, but I would prefer to keep the recording and see if, who recorded it, is willing to add a more specific regional label. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:32, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh. I (e/c) commented it out, on the basis that it's not great and the Australian audio clip should be enough, until someone hopefully records a better US file. - -sche (discuss) 19:33, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Scribal Abbreviation in English
While reading an mid 16th century book (the whetstone of witte) I came upon many words that were abbreviated by the use of macrons above vowels (ie: “cā” for “can” or “fractiō” for “fraction”); from further research I found out about the use of macrons in the Middle English language for such. It’s been pretty hard (maybe I’m just bad at it) to find other photocopies of original Early Modern English books, to see whether it was just the book I am reading that used scribal abbreviation or if other books in the Early Modern English period did so too. But to get to my point, since this would regard Middle English; possible Early Modern English (depending on if other books used scribal abbreviation as well); & Maybe Old English (I’m not well versed enough in Old English to know whether it used scribal abbreviation or not), should words that had forms in scribal abbreviation be included as distinct alternative forms of words with their own entries, or should they not? Yakodobro (talk) 15:19, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Those might be tildes or even some diacritic that we dont use anymore, though that doesnt answer your question .... I believe that our policy is to not list them, apart from a few exceptions like ouer where a word is so common that even an obsolete spelling can still crop up a lot. I couldnt find a policy discussion on this issue broadly, but I did turn up a similar discussion about Old English where we decided to no longer accept Old English words containing ƿ as alternate spellings of those spelled with w.  — Soap — 16:02, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank You! That helps a lot! Yakodobro (talk) 16:18, 24 August 2023 (UTC)


 * See Appendix:Early Modern English spellings (search tilde). In general this is basically a typographic feature of writing postvocalic n or m as a tilde, which can be applied arbitrarily and often inconsistently depending on the layout of a page, and the consensus seems to be against including those. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:15, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the link for the appendix, that helps a lot! Yakodobro (talk) 16:19, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

In Portuguese, the idiomatic expression  ("to give birth") seems to be the most accepted and also the standard form, taking a direct object: Ela deu à luz o bebê. However, at least in Brazil, it is way more common to hear this sentence as Ela deu a luz ao bebê, making "o bebê" the indirect object and reinterpreting "à luz" as "a luz". The question is: should dar a luz be added as an entry? If so, should it be considered a misspelling or just a variant? It doesn't seem "wrong" since the second sentence is gramatically correct. [Personally, I have never heard the "correct" sentence being used until I looked it up, and it honestly sounds unnatural.] OweOwnAwe (talk) 17:30, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

take a (sword, scythe, axe, etc) to
The 1973 quote was listed in a senseless ====Quotations==== section in take. I started to write a definition (near our def. 33) to cover it, but... notwithstanding that Merriam-Webster does have this as a sense of take (10a: "to have recourse to as an instrument for doing something", a subsense of their general "avail oneself of" sense), AFAICT this sense only exists with the following to. "I took an axe." can never mean what "I took an axe to the barrels" does, can it? So it seems like we need an entry take something to instead. What do you think? ("I took an arrow to the knee" is a different sense in the vein of "receive".) - -sche (discuss) 19:29, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Isn't it similar to "take someone to the movies"? PUC – 19:33, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Hmm, but that sense (our 9.4) can still exist without to, e.g. I took her home, I took him aside and told him privately. Can this sense? (This seems like a different sense from 9.4 IMO, since you're not merely escorting the sword to the location of the statue, you're attacking the statue.) - -sche (discuss) 19:38, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I don't think it's the same as take someone to the movies, and I agree this instrumental sense is only used in take something to. "took an axe to the movies", for example, can have multiple senses: bringing an axe to the cinema (PUC's SOP sense), which builds on "take an axe" without the prepositional phrase, or chopping up some rolls of film, which doesn't. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:58, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Parallel to put DET NOUN to as "put a knife to his throat". DCDuring (talk) 22:47, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * 'Our Constitution was a blank sheet of paper before someone took a pencil to it.' showing the pencil to be as mighty as any bladed instrument.
 * 'She took a brush to her daughter's hair.' DCDuring (talk) 22:50, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Since it seems to be confined to use with weapons and tools, would it help to add an n-g note stating plainly ? Or something close to that. — Soap — 11:54, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It takes an instrument (in the non-musical sense) of some kind as an indirect object, and usually implies some kind of drastic, harsh or destructive action on the direct object- although you do see writers or artists talk about taking a brush or a pencil to paper when they start to create something. The instrument is usually generic, especially for non-weapon usage: "take a wire brush to", but not "take Joe's wire brush to" or "take that wire brush to". I suspect that it originally was used of weapons, and the other uses started as a metaphorical extension of that. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:12, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Agreed. My impression has always been that it has a connotation of vigour. "Take an axe to" does not just mean "hit with an axe", it means "chop to pieces with an axe." "Take a brush to" does not just mean "brush", it means "brush energetically." So perhaps, "Apply (a weapon, or by extension other tools, instruments) with vigour" would be a suitable gloss. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:19, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe "usually vigorously"? Writers taking a pen to paper or a brush to canvas doesn't seem inherently 'vigorous'. OTOH, perhaps that's a separate sense, more closely interchangeable with 'put (something) to'. - -sche (discuss) 18:58, 27 August 2023 (UTC)


 * No OneLook reference has taken this on, except for McGraw-Hill Anerican Idioms having SoP take something to (someone, somewhere). But take something to with somethings like ax, pen, brush, mop should make for a valid entry. It's weakness is that it doesn't seem that anyone would think to search for it under that headword. DCDuring (talk) 23:04, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * A possible gloss for this is apply something to. DCDuring (talk) 23:10, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I share the concern about whether anyone would think to search for it. This is why I think we should more often deploy used in phrasal verbs as a definition-line thing; I don't think we can assume readers will think to look in "Derived terms" for "this verb, followed by the same preposition as it's followed by in other senses [like take her to the movies] that are covered in this entry, but for this sense it's covered in a different entry". In this case, take takes a lot of nouns ("take a bath", etc), but we could limit the "phrasal verbs" line to phrases with prepositions etc where the object noun still isn't part of the phrase (so "take to" but not "take a bath"). - -sche (discuss) 07:38, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Would this be a good use of or are there just too many for one or two lines under the sense line? We can't really expect to fully document all of these this decade. DCDuring (talk) 20:55, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

salvi
The word salvi ( has a bloody history ) is an actual insult created by mexican gangs in late 1980s early 1990s to mock and put down people from El Salvador. The Mexican gang members would harass Salvadoran guys and would physically attack them. The word salvi is the reason for the creation of the MS13 gang in Los Angeles. Please Be ware that when you use the word you may be starting a fight. Mexicans never stopped calling Salvadorans this word. The new generations don't know where it came from or how it all began. If you use it be aware you might get into trouble. A proud Salvadoran would never call themselves this. It feels wrong to say because it is. Respect our culture and people if you want to have the same respect for your country and people. 76.93.113.219 23:28, 24 August 2023 (UTC)


 * We don’t delete terms for being offensive or derogatory. Theknightwho (talk) 00:37, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
 * We don't have an entry for this term in Spanish ("Mexicans never stopped calling Salvadorans this word") and the English term doesn't label it derogatory. Perhaps it should, although the WP article  describes the word in glowing terms. This, that and the other (talk) 10:28, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

English vice, etc
IMO, a term like English vice is not a euphemistic form of the word gluttony. It's a euphemism for it, a en word for it. Likewise for gratuity, free helicopter ride, German vice, vice allemand, romancing the bone, celebrating Palm Sunday, French vice, male organ. A "euphemistic form of " is like batspit for batshit. Right? I propose to revise the entries accordingly. - -sche (discuss) 22:14, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, although I would also add that a lot of the citations for the many listed senses of "English vice" appear to be SOP predicates, e.g. saying that "hypocrisy is the English vice" is not using the term "English vice" to mean "hypocrisy". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:22, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
 * True. Shall we RFV it seeking better cites? - -sche (discuss) 06:38, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
 * In principle we should RfV it, but .... DCDuring (talk) 14:40, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

tweener
Do we really need the five definitions now appearing as subsenses of "A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups"? Does it seem reasonable to for our overburdened attesters to have to deal with them? DCDuring (talk) 14:51, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
 * We don’t need them from an abstract principal point of view, however they are still helpful to some dictionary users, even if we don’t need them. We also don’t need creatine monohydrate but it is reasonable to take it, as the time or money constraints are negligible. Remember WT:NOTPAPER. Fay Freak (talk) 02:24, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

and-bushes
What are "and-bushes", referred to in alongsides? (Spotted this while cleaning up instances of "and and".) - -sche (discuss) 19:55, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Judging from the page 13, following the page given in the citation, it must be a pronuniciation spelling or other alternate spelling of ambush. DCDuring (talk) 00:21, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

সোণা
Anyone able to improve the translation? "There were lacs of horses in thousands of numbers, / on they and and night they're bound with saddles made of gold." Maybe ? (Spotted this while cleaning up instances of "and and", but just removing the extra "and" doesn't solve what "in thousands of numbers, / on they and and night" is trying to say.) - -sche (discuss) 19:59, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
 * (I know next to nothing about Assamese but if I had to guess, and judging from the entries for ৰাতি দিনে, "they and and night" was a typo for "the day and night". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:18, 28 August 2023 (UTC))
 * So maybe "There were lacs of horses in thousands of numbers, / on they and and night they're bound with saddles made of gold." is meant to be "There were lakhs of horses, they numbered in the thousands, / and day and night they were bound with saddles made of gold."? - -sche (discuss) 21:25, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes. The 2nd part is accurate, it was a typo. I'm not sure about the first part. The given Hindi translation of it in a book is "वहां सहस्रों की संख्या में कई लाख घोड़े ऐसे थे जिन पर सोने की जीन दिन रात कसी रहती थी।". Which can be "There were many lakhs of horses in thousands of numbers, / which were bound with saddles made of gold." Msasag (discuss) 04:06, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

in limine
The definition at the adjective sense is for a noun. Which is it? Ultimateria (talk) 18:24, 29 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and reworded the definition to match the part of speech. There is abundant attestation of its use as an attributive adjective (in limine motion, in limine hearing, etc.). Voltaigne (talk) 00:15, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Family trees of descendants
I'm tempted to add at top of section video because visio is logically a branch of video, in that all of these descendants are from video. But I suspect that doing so is probably a bad thing, although I couldn't think of what the right thing to do is, regarding this theme. So instead I asked here, in the hope that someone can school me. This feels like the kind of thing where the answer will probably seem obvious once someone else explains it. In other words, a stupid question. Alas. Thanks for any help. Quercus solaris (talk) 04:52, 30 August 2023 (UTC)


 * If visio qualifies for this treatment, why wouldn't all the other derived terms listed under video which have descendants? Which is all but one of them. Nicodene (talk) 05:25, 30 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's part of why I knew something was wrong with the cross-reference idea. The thought that I began with is that somehow an English speaker who is using the English Wiktionary should easily learn from video that English vision is one of them. I could add English vision to video, right next to English view (which was my first thought), but I figured that someone would say that you can't put it there because it belongs exclusively at visio. The next thought could be, "well Latin visio should be included in video, and then the user clicks from there to arrive at English vision." But no, that's wrong, because the orthodox path is that one starts from Latin video's derived terms section, then follows from Latin visio there to get to visio and thus English vision. That's fine, and technically sound, although it doesn't lead English-speaking users of the English Wiktionary by the nose to discover the connection from video to English vision. Alas, that will have to be good enough (I realize that that's just the way it is), although I wish that there were some way to point it out more directly. Oh well. Quercus solaris (talk) 13:19, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

вероломный
Nothing in вероломный, though it was obvious to me that the decomposition should be веро- + ломный, which in English equates to "faith" + "broken". I could not find an internet source confirming this. Though it is probably in that etymological dictionary by Макс Фасмерд, I do not really want to look it up there. I am new to Wiktionary, and I am unsure about edit policy or what not. Superficially, editing of etymology, which involves reference to the likes of Proto-Slavic or Proto-Indo-European with the likes of inh+|ru|orv|вѣра enclosed in double braces which generates "" seems not entirely trivial.

Suggestions would be welcome. I have taken a very quick look at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Tutorial_(Wiktionary_links). Gmachine1729 (talk) 08:13, 30 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Shansky suggests that it was borrowed from Polish . The surface analysis is . I've expanded вероломный accordingly. Voltaigne (talk) 23:47, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

bear
Will someone more knowledgeable than I about templates and such please edit bear on my behalf? The plural of bear (meaning, the animal) can be bears, but it can also be bear. Multiple Mooses (talk) 23:21, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The Ngram doesn't mean much: "many bear" overwhelmingly appears either in attributive contexts like "many bear hunters", "many bear populations", "many bear stories", etc., or using the verb "to bear", as in "how many bear all sorts of ill-treatment". There are older texts where "many bear" does appear as a noun phrase by itself, but the same form appears for other animals (: "many bear, pig, and porcupine"), so it seems better understood as a more general trend of treating animals as uncountable in certain contexts where they wouldn't normally be today than as an actual plural form. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:54, 30 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree with much of the line of thought above except the idea that the no-inflectional-difference form [necessarily or always] represents an uncountable form. It has ambiguity that allows for both that parsing and the parsing as a plural form, and both are visible among the population of attestations; the presence of "many" rather than "much" in that quote is a signal that the way the speaker was parsing the nouns was as  plural forms, thus acting the same way as sheep (n.pl.) and deer (n.pl.) act. I have heard a few other nouns act this way sociolectally, including brick and block. I would swear (despite others perhaps denying it) that an implicit notion of the  countable sense being especially closely semantically adjacent to (cheek by jowl with) the (morphologically identical) noncount sense seems to exist with most of them, as brick and block among masons are almost begging to be conceptualized in the same mental bucket as crushed stone [fragments] and sand [grains] (that is, technically countable but practicably often worth treating as noncount), and the same could be said with the animals, where conceptualization as meat (noncount) is always just a breath away from conceptualization as countable individuals. It wouldn't necessarily be bad for Wiktionary to acknowledge/enter the nonstandard null-morpheme plurals, but admittedly there may be so many of them (as mentioned in the comment above) as to draw too much attention to them if they were all to be entered, and admittedly other major dictionaries often don't enter them (but M-W Collegiate does in fact enter "or plural bear" as second-listed plural variant on its first sense of bear [=Ursidae]). They are interesting as examples of the theme that 'nonstandard' doesn't always equal 'wrong', although people often think of 'nonstandard' as equaling 'wrong'. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:15, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
 * You're right actually that with many it shouldn't properly be termed uncountable, though my thinking was similar to yours about a "semantic" uncountability that's presumably at work in the background. The question's still whether this is proper to mention in the headword of the entry, or whether it would need to be a usage note about an archaic usage, perhaps a template shared by the various animal entries it might apply to. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 10:25, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree that the latter idea is excellent. As you said, just a template call would do, whereas the template might say something (short but accurate) such as, "This noun, like various other nouns for animals, has an uncommon and nonstandard variant (-inflection) plural form." Perhaps I will do that sometime if the spirit moves me to follow through on executing it. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:50, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

vertic
I suspect this needs work. "Vertical" and "extreme" are not synonyms. Equinox ◑ 01:36, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The "extreme" was a misinterpretation, it just refers to the sun being high up per the OED. Fixed. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 13:51, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

having all cylinders in a single row
At least two pages (straight and suora) mention having all cylinders in a single row, but neither page links to cylinder--and even if they did, how would they specify the automotive meaning? i don't know cars and only figured out we were talking about a straight engine after a lucky guess that led me to  straight engine. (My first guess was actually that it was a name for a specific way to win a game, like a straight flush, but in a game with cylindrical pieces, like Quarto.) Any suggestions? --173.67.42.107 02:57, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Some other dictionaries have the engine-specific sense that you have noticed to be missing. I don't see that any of our existing definitions address this. " Having all cylinders in a single straight line; in-line." DCDuring (talk) 13:32, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

люди
People near the front lines of the Russo-Ukrainian war paint this on their houses to indicate there are "civilians" inside, and that is usually how media reports translate it. Our entry has only the more basic meaning, "people humans". Is "civilians" a secondary sense, a subsense, an "especially..." clause of the existing sense, or just a contextual inference? It does seem like, in this situation and presumably others, it means "civilians" specifically to the exclusion of other people, since validly targetable soldiers are also "people" but homeowners seem to use this word in the hope of not being targeted.... - -sche (discuss) 04:39, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Just look at the Russian and Ukrainian translations of . Would be too complicated, long, to paint. Also “civilians” is kind of a strange word, rather used by people having the leisure to write articles, why would anyone “identify” as “civilian”? They identify as the superset of humans to which soldiers also belong, to talk to them. For English-language writers there is no corresponding intuitive language. Fay Freak (talk) 06:02, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

叫獸
Should the Cantonese pronunciation be there? (Issue previously raised as an RFD.) — justin(r)leung { (t...) 07:14, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

compás de calibres
What's a compás de calibres in English? It has outward-facing legs and is used to measure the diameter of the entire of tubes. Jin and Tonik (talk) 09:10, 31 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @Jin and Tonik Hi, this would be a type of caliper, such as a vernier caliper.
 * SimonWikt (talk) 10:17, 31 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks, they look like it Jin and Tonik (talk) 10:31, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

誒
This is E, the word means the native name of the language itself. On the CJK word requests, it was seemingly empty. I've decided to add it here, as I do not know what to do. - alex the mid person (talk page here) 15:48, 31 August 2023 (UTC)