> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter
I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup?
Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.
Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.
Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.
E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.
In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.
Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.
I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".
> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.
May I introduce you to the German language?
We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).
Boiling water is mostly same as boiling anything. So I would just have "boiling". No need for "boiling water". I see no reason why boiling water could not just be covered by whatever general boiling entry covers.
Your "to me" is actually problematic, because it legitimizes this nonsensical idea and turns words and their meaning into something purely individualistic, which cannot end well for the current, but even more so for the next generation.
I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that two words, which are supposedly one word, definitely are not one word.
Yeah, but the nice thing about natural language is, it doesn't matter what you think. People talk because they want to communicate something. You can try to talk your pet language at other people, but you will fail at communicating. So things have a happy way of sorting themselves out.
I’m so glad I’m not going insane. I don’t see any examples on that site that I agree are ‘one word’. Sure they’re singular concepts but so what? Are we going to have singular words to describe all adjective noun pairs now?
Surprised that no comment mentioned that there is a standard term (not a word :P) for the set of words that denominates a particular concept: nominal syntagm. Such as "boiling water" and also "that green parrot we saw yesterday over the left branch".
Also the slider examples are abysmal. "I love you", "Go home" and "How are you" are not words by any stretch of imagination. For someone who makes word games, I don't see a particularly deep love of words here.
I disagree these belong in a traditional dictionary.
I could, however be convinced these could be documented/defined in a separate document, especially from the perspective you are coming from (word games).
Two related compound words from a Norwegian dialect, both mean "fish food":
Fiskemat
Fiskmat
The latter means food made from fish, the former means food for fish. Standard varieties of Norwegian only use the former to mean both, to the annoyance of many old fishermen.
This maybe illustrates why the author's examples such as boiling water aren't so weird. Yes, in English it means water that's boiling, but you have to know that. It could for instance have meant water for boiling, like "cooling water" means water for cooling say in a nuclear reactor, not water which is in the process of getting cool.
A compound word isn't just a phrase. The latter is a group of words that indicate a single concept. The former is a new word that has a distinct meaning from the subwords that compose it. "I love you" is an example of a clausal phrase. The meaning is entirely evident from the words that compose it. In contrast, a "hot dog" is not a particularly warm canine, and has its own OED entry [0] as a compound word.
And some of the entries on this list are wrong. "Good night" exists in OED as "goodnight" [1] because there are multiple ways it's used. One is the clausal phrase "I hope you have a good night", which can be modified by changing the adjective, e.g. "great night" or "terrible night". "Goodnight" the bedtime ritual can't be modified the same way, so OED chooses to write it as a compound word without spaces.
There are nearly half a million compound phrases that aren’t in any dictionary—simply because they contain spaces. “Boiling water.” “Saturday night.” “Help me.”
I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.
It's quite interesting that "boiling water" in many Slavic languages is actually a separate word (and not derived from "water", but from "boiling"; similar how the author mentions "ice" being used instead of "frozen water").
It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.
in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?
We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.
While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system.
This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but it has practical everyday consequences. It's why boiling food works so consistently as a universal cooking option.
You don't need to control the temperature of boiling water, it is an exact temperature that depends only on ambient pressure. As a consequence recipes work by only specifying time, sometimes with a single adjustment for people at higher altitudes.
This is remarkable given the wide variety of containers and heat sources used, and it is used practically by virtually every cooking tradition, even if it's reason for working is not common knowledge.
It shouldn't be surprising it'd acquire a single word as a unified concept.
When those technical distinctions are important we use specific technical terms for them (of which there are a few different ones for the phase transition - depending on discipline).
The cooking term is "rolling boil" which is a nice two word combo with a specific meaning.
but what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils.
edit: In those other languages is it like how we use ice? where water is the default, but it could mean any frozen liquid?
As you note, we have a specific word for solid water. Additionally, in colloquial speech “water” almost exclusively refers to the liquid state. Finally we have “steam” to refer to the gaseous state.
So English arguably has three unique words for the three common states of H2O.
It's a great question, and is tough to answer intuitively without speaking a native language that actually has such a word.
I would agree that "boiling milk" and "boiling oil" are very unlikely to get separate words, unless one of them happens to be an extremely common thing that people encounter a lot and that has special practical implications.
Milk might be a special case, in that it essentially is just water with some other stuff dissolved. It is to water as salt water is to water... but more so.
My guess would be that the single word might get pressed into service like "ice" does, but I think we'd have to find languages that include this word and survey native speakers. It could vary.
Nearly everyone encounters boiling water in everyday life, but do most people ever see other liquids boiling, even once, and especially during the historical periods that shaped our current languages? If not we might be getting into something like technical language, where daily life lines up poorly and terms and jargon get formalized.
What do you mean by "why we would have"? Dictionaries aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. If by "we" you mean English speakers, clearly you don't have a word for that. But if you mean some Slavic languages, they do. Likewise, English has "ice", while other languages simply call it "frozen water". Or take the example from the linked article, "at home", which some languages do have a separate word for. I don't think many languages have a distinct word for "at work" though, or "at the shop". That simply reflects that being at home is a more common and generally important concept, just like boiling water is more important in some sense than boiling milk.
Asking for the "reasons" behind a certain word existing is sort of like asking why the human body looks the way it does. Sure, scientists may have good theories why it was evolutionary advantageous to have five fingers and no tail, but in the end the only answer that's for certain is, "because it evolved that way". So the answer is, "we" have a word for boiling water because people found it useful to have such a word.
> but boiled water is steam > We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.
I don't know how it is in other languages but in English "boiled water" and "boiling water" refer to different things - boiled water may be steam or water that has underwent some boiling, e.g. for sanitation, on the other hand "boiling water" refers strictly to water that is in the process of boiling.
I can see why some languages may have a separate word for one of these concepts to avoid some of the ambiguity.
I'm not a fan of extending the language with new words unless they are compound (with or without spaces) but extending the dictionaries with more and better descriptions is a no-brainer, there's a lot missing from them.
Arguably it depends more on the atmospheric pressure to get boiling water as close as possible to 100°C.
The general rule of thumb is that black tea (i.e. fermented tea leaves) should be brewed at 100°C, green tea (non-fermented tea leaves) should be brewed around 80°C to avoid it being bitter and white tea (young, non-fermented tea leaves) is best at around 70°C.
I mean it’s interesting that this is generally the case with many (or even most) words across languages… But I’d wager it’s more the norm than the exception, so I don’t know if “boiling water” is that interesting of an example.
The rest of the article did a good job explaining that. I just think those were terrible examples for the introduction. I think "shut up", "good night", and "hot dog" would have really got the point across better, but those might already be in dictionaries.
They're clearly a bit over-zealous bout what examples they think have meaning. They cite substitution as a good test for a phrase but double down on boiling water.
> Lexicographers used a substitutability test: if you can swap synonyms freely, it’s not a lexical unit. “Cold feet” (meaning fear) can’t become “frigid feet”—so it gets an entry. But the test cuts both ways. You can say “boiling water” but not “seething water” or “raging water.” The phrase resists substitution too.
These aren't failures for substitution because "Raging" isn't' a synonym in this case. where frigid would be a reasonable.
I wonder perhaps if the author is confusing the idiom "hot water" which is in there https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hot_water and would fail the substitution test.
Cool, going back over them I'm actually surprised at the strength of the substitution test, thus far I haven't really encountered one that strongly goes against the test if a suitable synonym is picked.
There are a few things for which English simply doesn't have anything to substitute and those are harder to assess. boiling is one but so would "blood" in "blood pressure", obviously replacing it with another liquid has basically the same meaning eg water pressure, oil pressure but as far as I can tell there's literally no synonym for blood.
I those cases I try to use a stand in from another language to see of the substitution works. for for example "sangre" in Spanish so "sangre pressure" which doesn't seem to affect it's meaning much so I'd argue it's exclusion.
Conversely "Red tape" cannot be "roja tape" and a "caliente dog" is one trapped in a car not a food.
Yeah, the good examples are usually in dictionaries as headwords, the moderate examples are usually in dictionaries as phrases within the entry for one (or more) of the words that comprise them, leaving fairly weak examples actually “missing” if you want to use “missing words with spaces” as the basis for content.
All words in a thesaurus would generally also be in a dictionary? The difference between a thesaurus and a dictionary is what each tells you about a word.
In the US, if you ordered a hot dog and got a sausage (or vice versa), it would be very reasonable to return the item and ask for something else. They are culturally completely different, the same way Cheerios in milk is not another cold soup like gazpacho is.
The first two I kind of understand what the author means. But "help me" and "severe pain" made me think that I'm just not the right public for this text.
A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water.
It likely could apply to other liquids in the same mixed state, but would be assumed to refer to water (or solutions or colloidal mixtures primarily consisting of water) in common speech.
Water is extremely common, and has anonymously high heats of crystalization and vaporization, so it is the most common example of a mixed phase system and the only one most people encounter in everyday life.
qanik -- snow falling
aput -- snow on the ground
pukak -- crystalline powder snow (like salt)
aniuk -- snow used to make water
maujaq -- deep soft snow you sink into
piqsirpoq (verb) -- drifting snow / blowing snow
Central Alaskan Yup’ik
qanuk -- falling snow
aput -- snow on the ground
nevluk -- wet snow
aniu -- snow for drinking water
As far as my limited knowledge of linguistics goes, the technical term is actually "collocations."
To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach.
I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did!
(Before any LLM zealots attack me, yes, it is now possible to have a more exhaustive list of collocations thanks to LLMs. This doesn't contradict my point.)
AIUI, collocations are just "words that often go together". It doesn't signal any unconventional meaning to the construction, that would make it a proper idiom.
If the compound words all have single word entries in the dictionary that when combined mean the same thing what is the point?
Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid
Boiling: having reached the boiling point
Boiling Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid which has reached the boiling point
If Boiling Water had some other completely different meaning that has nothing to do with the individual words then sure, maybe, otherwise this is completely redundant and opinionated.
As an English native, I'd rather see proper nouns in a dictionary before seeing "compound words".
Personally, I don't agree that "boiling water" is a word (with a space) - I would refer to it as a phrase if it had specific meaning, but it just seems like an ordinary pairing of adjective and noun. Also, if a word can contain a space, then what is the meaning of "words" as there doesn't seem an easy way to distinguish between a "compound word" and a common phrase. Is "barking dog" a pair of words, a compound word or a phrase? (It's a pair of words in my mind)
Collocation dictionaries are lists of collocations. The reason they're absent from single word dictionaries is because there's about 25x more collocations than single words.
While 'this analysis would not have been possible without LLM', I am not sure the LLM analysis was well reviewed after it has been done. From the obscure/familiar word list, some of the n-grams, e.g. "is resource", "seq size", "db xref" surely happen in the wild (we well know), but I would doubt that we can argue they are missing from the dictionary. Knowing the realm, I would argue none of them are words, not even collocations. If "is resource" is, why not, "has resource"?
So while the path is surely interesting, this analysis does miss scrutiny, which you would expect from a high-level LLM analysis.
The very bottom of the slider is there to illustrate where LLM artifacts and Wiktionary noise live — it's not presented as legitimate vocabulary. The slider lets you see the full quality gradient, including where it breaks down.
That's not really mentioned in the article, though. As far as the article is concerned, the right side of that slider is valid-but-possibly-too-rare-to-be-interesting, when in fact it's just garbage. This does not sell the concept well.
On my first encounter with a Unix machine (an SGI IRC) I had heard that system help was available with the "man" command, so I typed "man"; the resulting "apropro what?" made me laugh out loud, and the other people in the room looked at me like I was some kind of idiot.
We act as if some languages have "compound words" that can encompass entire sentences (subject & object attaching to the verb as prefixes or suffixes) while others don't form compounds, and most are somewhere in between. But these are all statements about lexicographic conventions and say nothing about the languages. In reality all languages are muddles sprawling across a multidimensional continuum, and they abso-frigging-lutely do n't sit neatly in such pigeonholes.
This is a great comparison. We're arguing about the definition of "word", and attempting to expand it to include edge cases where two words with separate meanings have a different atomic meaning when combined.
We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.
Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.
I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.
It’s probably a thing, especially with loan-words (eg.: “avant garde”), and there are probably much better examples… But the examples in the article make no sense to me.
The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed.
The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.
We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.
"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.
I disagree that "saturday night" ever means anything other than the literal meaning of the nighttime of the day of saturday.
You can argue that there's a connotative association with the phrase. Sure. Just like "beach weather", or "blizzard conditions". But that doesn't make "saturday night" special in any way.
I wonder if the connotative association is exactly what we are trying to capture here though, and if those other phrases also fit in at the "separate words but slightly special" end of the spectrum.
There is meaning being communicated in all of those phrases that would be obvious to most or all people who are embedded in the language and culture where they are used, and which transcends the definitions of the individual words themselves.
It seems that there are several axis here -- how explicit is meaning, how atomic, how literal, how substitutable are the individual words -- and all vary continuously.
That might all seem needlessly pedantic for the question of "should it warrant a dictionary entry", but if you are trying to extract all information encoded in a verbal exchange, they might be useful concepts.
It's an evocative phrase. It definitely means different things to different people though. Teenager vs adult, single vs married, employed vs not.
Or how about "Sunday morning"? It's evocative for sure. But very differently for different groups.
Or "island breeze". Stirs up images and feelings. But the definition is literal and the connotations are somewhat personal.
I'd argue that none of these phrases belong in a dictionary. Possibly explicitly because the "missing" meanings are the associative connotations, but those vary for different people, so what's the canonical definition?
but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary.
Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"
More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?
Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?
It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.
In general, transparent compounds, i.e. those whose meaning can be derived from the elements, are not in the dictionary. Mushroom soup is transparent; Krankenhaus, which means hospital, but is literally sick-people home, isn't.
In Dutch we indeed happily do this even for English loanwords like "creditcard" or something more obscure like "lockpick". When in doubt, remove the space.
That happens often with domain names, but then you get expertsexchange.com, penisland.net, whorepresents.com, therapistfinder.com, a Dutch pre-match analysis site voorspel.nl, or a site about the game overspel.nl.
Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data
Hah, I wonder how thick a German, Dutch or Afrikaans dictionary would be if it included all possible spaceless compound words. Literally any concept can be compounded together to make a new word.
Roovleisslaghuisinspekteur =
Rooi = red
Vleis = meat
Slag = butcher
Huis = house
Inspekteur = inspector
"Inspector who controls the quality of red meat in butcheries"
>Spanish carves up time with precision English lacks: madrugada for the pre-dawn hours, atardecer for late afternoon waning into evening. The mid-day nap was so compelling we adopted the siesta into English.
"I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening -- or the mid evening. Just the early evening, mid evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early midafternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning... But never at dusk." -Steve Martin
Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean.
Some cases are basically impossible "Crash blossoms" you don't stand any chance without knowing why we call them that
Some are middling difficult, "Home Secretary" requires that you know every meaning for the two words and then you happen to pick the correct obscure meaning, a "Secretary" could be in charge, and "Home" could mean the entire country as distinct from everywhere else.
But "Hospital bills" doesn't seem even marginally difficult
I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.
But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.
> But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger
Ginger ale is in fact, not an ale, it's a soft drink. It is distantly related to Ginger Beer and some variants of Ginger Beer are alcoholic like ales, but Ginger ale was conceived as a soft drink and today continues as a soft drink.
My (likely ignorant) understanding was that the non-alcoholic "ale"s and "beer"s were fermented like their traditional versions, but the process was stopped before the ethanol level became significant.
Mass-market ginger ales and root beers are not made that way today, of course.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between this compound word concept and idioms. Both are largely atomic, defy analysis via individual word definition, and fairly language (and culture or dialect) specific.
Dictionaries are also language specific. We don't necessarily expect a 1:1 mapping of words between languages. I have personally always wondered if this subtley shapes thoughts in different languages as well.
I think it's more than overlap -- they are the same thing.
I.e. AFAICT, all compound words that defy literal interpretation are idioms. And it's that simple.
The argument then becomes that idioms should be in the dictionary. Some of them are of course, but idioms and slang are a) fast-moving, and b) often dismissed by the sorts of people who edit dictionaries.
I tend to agree. The definitions overlap perfectly.
At the same time, I am having intuitive issues seeing "hot dog" as an idiom, vs just an ordinary noun. It certainly seems to follow noun rules, and fit into speech as one.
I don't know for sure that it's NOT an idiom though. I could just be wrong here, and have intuition in need of calibration.
No, I think you're right -- "hot dog" started out as a colloquial name for a type of sausage (apparently as something of a joke, because dog meat was sometimes eaten in the area, and it was a low-quality product), and it is now the accepted name.
So it was an idiom, now it's canon.
Another good one might be "hot dish", which has an idiomatic meaning in the midwestern US, and is slowly spreading. Not sure if it's made it to the dictionary yet. (which dictionary becomes an important question -- I'd expect to see it in M-W before, say, OED)
Sure, but my main intent was to raise the question as to why it was singled out in the article/blog post as something that needs to be in the dictionary.
As you've pointed out, the word "bills" clarifies what it is. I don't see why every combination needs to be in a dictionary. The list would be incredibly long, eg. "phone bills" or "power bills", etc.
At the moment, I'm in the hospital. I've been here since 0500 Friday morning. I should be released tomorrow, Tuesday. During those five days I've had services from doctors, nurses, technicians and [everybody else necessary to run a hospital]. There were multiple uses of CT scanners, ultrasounds and many machines which go Bing!. Also, a surgical operating suite, of which I remember about 60 seconds of very bright white lights and very large-screen monitors suspended from ridiculously heavy-duty supports. Like, you could safely dangle four football players of your choice (gridiron, rugby or association, doesn't matter) from them.
A team of people will compile a bill for all of those services. The bill will be presented to the insurance company whose card I showed Friday morning. It will likely be less than a million dollars, but it could easily be more than a hundred thousand dollars. That's the right order of magnitude to consider: a good percentage of a house, maybe a very large nice house.
The insurance company will claim that some of these charges are too much. The hospital knows this, and there are three mechanisms in which they justify their prices. First, although the two Tums antacids have a street value of eighteen cents when you buy it over the counter in quantity fifty, the hospital buys them in blister-packs so to avoid cross-contamination until they reach the patient. Second, it is customary to pretend that only the services which a patient actually used can be charged for, so the in-house plumber, the gas plumbers, the cryogenic fluids specialists, the oxidizing gases technicians, the potable water testers, and the electricians among a cast of thousand all need to be paid for.
And third, there's emergency care for the uninsured.
The US is cruel, but not stupid. No, I lie, it is frequently both cruel and stupid, always to people already disadvantaged in some other way. As a matter of law, a hospital can't turn away or discharge a person who is likely to die without treatment, even if they can't pay. But the government doesn't provide money to pay for that.
Finally, most hospitals or hospital systems in the US are run by for-profit private companies. I won't mention organized crime in the same sentence, but one can reasonably presume that the two are interchangeable in terms of law-abidingness and willingness to trade down ethics for an increase in profits.
So, having created the bill and sent it to an insurance company, they will argue back and forth and finally some portion of the money will eventually be transferred and everyone will be more or less happy, right?
No. Because in the US, the standard for healthcare insurance is to avoid the moral hazard of people attempting to get too much healthcare by having the insurance company bill the patient.
Remember the bill that started out as the same scale as a house? 10% "coinsurance" is often considered generous. 20% is pretty normal. Some specific services will be called out with specific fees, and others may be "disallowed" -- and sent through entirely to the patient.
That's on top of the monthly payments that have already happened.
But I work for a tech company with an unusually enlightened attitude, so I expect that my family's fiscal impact from this bout of medical intervention will be limited to the parking fees that my wife paid when she came to visit me.
It's privilege, but I'd rather that the system be reformed so that everybody got it.
Dictionaries are a mixed bag at best. If you apply David Kaplan’s character/content distinction from Demonstratives, you have to ask: should pure indexicals, which are essentially 'contentless' pointers be treated the same way as standard words? Let alone the thousands of rigid designators in this dataset that map directly to specific objects in the real world. At a certain point, is there no room left for encyclopedias?
I got into solving the NYT crossword during Covid. I couldn’t solve a Monday when I started; now I do Mondays downs-only and look forward to Saturdays. Along the way, I developed a sixth sense for when an answer will be more than one word. I’ve thought a lot about it and can’t really describe how I do it. (Some other puzzles clarify if an answer spans multiple words, but I find the ambiguity adds to the fun.)
Do you think this comes from a gradual internalization of a real linguistic concept? Or it more a familiarity with common (if unspoken) conventions of the puzzle makers?
I suspect the answer isn't binary, but it's interesting to think about.
This "sixth sense" phenomenon seems to pop up a lot. Crosswords are a great example. The sense some people are getting for detecting LLM output might be another.
A mixture of melting ice and water suitable for drinking has a word: ice water. It's not a adjective noun phrase. It has a more specific meaning than just the two words together. You can order an ice water at a restaurant
Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas; water in the gas phase is “water vapor” which also doesn't have a single word.
This is also an interesting case because “vapor” without a qualifier also refers to a suspension of solid or liquid particles in gas (of which “steam” is a particular example).
"Steam" is very definitely the gas phase of water. Water vapor is too. If we are talking about chemistry they are essentially synonyms.
If we are talking engineering, the term steam generally implies water vapor that is at or above the saturation temperature.
In every day usage they are usually drawing a distinction between visible and invisible water vapor, usually caused by the presence of liquid droplets, with "steam" being essentially "fog", but hotter.
"Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas": You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants). I was Main Propulsion Assistant on a steam powered destroyer, and I can assure you that every effort is made to prevent droplets being suspended in the steam--because such droplets erode the blades on steam turbines. To that end, steam coming out of the stem drum (the upper part of the boiler) is run through superheaters, which raise the temperature of the incoming steam to evaporate any droplets. On our ship, the steam coming off the steam drum was a bit over 1200 psi and 600 some degrees Fahrenheit. After it goes through the superheaters, it's about the same pressure but 975 degrees.
And there's effectively no other gas in the steam, because dissolved air in the boiler's feedwater (particularly oxygen and carbon dioxide) has to be removed to prevent corrosion. To that end, water going into the boiler is first run through a deaerator, to remove any air that dissolved in the water as it came through the condensor.
> You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants
Well, that's true, I haven't, BUT still I went back and forth writing and deleting and rewriting and eventually deleting a whole digression about the special case of the jargon of steam power and how it uses “wet steam” (or “saturated steam”) for “steam” in the general use sense and “dry steam” for “water vapor” and “superheated steam” for dry steam created by heating wet steam away from contact with water, before deciding that was way too much, but, yeah, that's all true. (And, in details about the actual processes used, a lot more than I knew or would have gone into even if I had and had decided to keep the digression.)
Nope, water vapour is the gas phase of water mixed with other gases while steam is just the gas phase of water. Water vapour can condense into tiny droplets which can freeze into ice crystals, both of which are visible as 'clouds'. Steam is not visible until it condenses into droplets at which point it no longer is steam but water suspended in another medium, usually air.
Almost but not exactly, 'boiled water' can go two ways: phase changed to steam (at which point is is no longer 'boiled water') or boiled and cooled again. Pedantic? Sure. Fits right in here? Absolutely.
Phrasal verbs are listed under the main verb. I never ever had a problem with that. As a native speaker sometimes I still have to search for some in some strange context.
These particular examples are figures of speech, so "shut" in "shut up" still means the same thing it would mean in "shut the door." And "up" is used the same way as "cover up."
So the issue is just that this is figurative language, and you have to know that a kickoff is the beginning of certain sports, for example. It's more of a cultural issue than something a dictionary needs to fix.
They don't get into enough learning lists, and from my perspective, they are great additions to word games because the more transparent compounds are unique and legit words that can more than double the accessible vocabulary.
Very cool project! Reminds me Chiang's great short story 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling':
> “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. Thatʼs why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?
> “But you speak slowly because youʼre a foreigner. Iʼm Tiv, so I donʼt pause when I speak. Shouldnʼt my writing be the same?”
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter
I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup?
Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.
Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.
[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you]
Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.
E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.
In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.
Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.
I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".
[1] https://ordbokene.no/bm/svart%20hull
> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.
May I introduce you to the German language?
We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).
And we don't expect dictionaries to contain every compound word you could come up with in German either.
Not the ones that someone could come up with, just the ones people do use.
Boiling water is mostly same as boiling anything. So I would just have "boiling". No need for "boiling water". I see no reason why boiling water could not just be covered by whatever general boiling entry covers.
> to me
Your "to me" is actually problematic, because it legitimizes this nonsensical idea and turns words and their meaning into something purely individualistic, which cannot end well for the current, but even more so for the next generation.
I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that two words, which are supposedly one word, definitely are not one word.
Yeah, but the nice thing about natural language is, it doesn't matter what you think. People talk because they want to communicate something. You can try to talk your pet language at other people, but you will fail at communicating. So things have a happy way of sorting themselves out.
Some other words that are sorely missing from dictionaries: "Warm water", "hot water", "cold water", "dirty water"
Yep, all of the following make perfect sense to me, they're just non-idiomatic:
- Don't put your hand in water that's boiling,
- Add the pasta to water that's boiling,
- That saucepan is full of water that's boiling.
If "boiling water" were a distinct word, all of these sentences would change meaning compare to their idiomatic counterparts.
I’m so glad I’m not going insane. I don’t see any examples on that site that I agree are ‘one word’. Sure they’re singular concepts but so what? Are we going to have singular words to describe all adjective noun pairs now?
Surprised that no comment mentioned that there is a standard term (not a word :P) for the set of words that denominates a particular concept: nominal syntagm. Such as "boiling water" and also "that green parrot we saw yesterday over the left branch".
Also the slider examples are abysmal. "I love you", "Go home" and "How are you" are not words by any stretch of imagination. For someone who makes word games, I don't see a particularly deep love of words here.
Edit: Obligatory reference to Borges's Tlön: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
This feels like ragebait (rage bait?) for people that enjoy language and words. The leading example is nonsense.
I disagree these belong in a traditional dictionary.
I could, however be convinced these could be documented/defined in a separate document, especially from the perspective you are coming from (word games).
Two related compound words from a Norwegian dialect, both mean "fish food":
Fiskemat Fiskmat
The latter means food made from fish, the former means food for fish. Standard varieties of Norwegian only use the former to mean both, to the annoyance of many old fishermen.
This maybe illustrates why the author's examples such as boiling water aren't so weird. Yes, in English it means water that's boiling, but you have to know that. It could for instance have meant water for boiling, like "cooling water" means water for cooling say in a nuclear reactor, not water which is in the process of getting cool.
If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.
A compound word isn't just a phrase. The latter is a group of words that indicate a single concept. The former is a new word that has a distinct meaning from the subwords that compose it. "I love you" is an example of a clausal phrase. The meaning is entirely evident from the words that compose it. In contrast, a "hot dog" is not a particularly warm canine, and has its own OED entry [0] as a compound word.
And some of the entries on this list are wrong. "Good night" exists in OED as "goodnight" [1] because there are multiple ways it's used. One is the clausal phrase "I hope you have a good night", which can be modified by changing the adjective, e.g. "great night" or "terrible night". "Goodnight" the bedtime ritual can't be modified the same way, so OED chooses to write it as a compound word without spaces.
[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hot-dog_n
[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/goodnight_n
There are nearly half a million compound phrases that aren’t in any dictionary—simply because they contain spaces. “Boiling water.” “Saturday night.” “Help me.”
I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.
It's quite interesting that "boiling water" in many Slavic languages is actually a separate word (and not derived from "water", but from "boiling"; similar how the author mentions "ice" being used instead of "frozen water").
Japan is similar with 熱湯 boiling、お湯 heated、白湯 boiled once then cooled down、水 cold
It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.
in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?
We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.
While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system.
This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but it has practical everyday consequences. It's why boiling food works so consistently as a universal cooking option.
You don't need to control the temperature of boiling water, it is an exact temperature that depends only on ambient pressure. As a consequence recipes work by only specifying time, sometimes with a single adjustment for people at higher altitudes.
This is remarkable given the wide variety of containers and heat sources used, and it is used practically by virtually every cooking tradition, even if it's reason for working is not common knowledge.
It shouldn't be surprising it'd acquire a single word as a unified concept.
> somewhere esoteric technical distinction
When those technical distinctions are important we use specific technical terms for them (of which there are a few different ones for the phase transition - depending on discipline).
The cooking term is "rolling boil" which is a nice two word combo with a specific meaning.
but what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils.
edit: In those other languages is it like how we use ice? where water is the default, but it could mean any frozen liquid?
I could see boiling oil being it's own word because when used as a weapon it's unlikely to actually be boiling and yet still be called "boiling oil".
As you note, we have a specific word for solid water. Additionally, in colloquial speech “water” almost exclusively refers to the liquid state. Finally we have “steam” to refer to the gaseous state.
So English arguably has three unique words for the three common states of H2O.
It's a great question, and is tough to answer intuitively without speaking a native language that actually has such a word.
I would agree that "boiling milk" and "boiling oil" are very unlikely to get separate words, unless one of them happens to be an extremely common thing that people encounter a lot and that has special practical implications.
Milk might be a special case, in that it essentially is just water with some other stuff dissolved. It is to water as salt water is to water... but more so.
My guess would be that the single word might get pressed into service like "ice" does, but I think we'd have to find languages that include this word and survey native speakers. It could vary.
Nearly everyone encounters boiling water in everyday life, but do most people ever see other liquids boiling, even once, and especially during the historical periods that shaped our current languages? If not we might be getting into something like technical language, where daily life lines up poorly and terms and jargon get formalized.
What do you mean by "why we would have"? Dictionaries aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. If by "we" you mean English speakers, clearly you don't have a word for that. But if you mean some Slavic languages, they do. Likewise, English has "ice", while other languages simply call it "frozen water". Or take the example from the linked article, "at home", which some languages do have a separate word for. I don't think many languages have a distinct word for "at work" though, or "at the shop". That simply reflects that being at home is a more common and generally important concept, just like boiling water is more important in some sense than boiling milk.
Asking for the "reasons" behind a certain word existing is sort of like asking why the human body looks the way it does. Sure, scientists may have good theories why it was evolutionary advantageous to have five fingers and no tail, but in the end the only answer that's for certain is, "because it evolved that way". So the answer is, "we" have a word for boiling water because people found it useful to have such a word.
> but boiled water is steam > We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.
I don't know how it is in other languages but in English "boiled water" and "boiling water" refer to different things - boiled water may be steam or water that has underwent some boiling, e.g. for sanitation, on the other hand "boiling water" refers strictly to water that is in the process of boiling.
I can see why some languages may have a separate word for one of these concepts to avoid some of the ambiguity.
I'm not a fan of extending the language with new words unless they are compound (with or without spaces) but extending the dictionaries with more and better descriptions is a no-brainer, there's a lot missing from them.
Yes, and substitution of boiled for boiling water has produced many terrible cups of tea.
It depends on the tea, but some cannot be well made with a metal pot of water that's taken a few minutes to get from the kettle to the table.
Arguably it depends more on the atmospheric pressure to get boiling water as close as possible to 100°C.
The general rule of thumb is that black tea (i.e. fermented tea leaves) should be brewed at 100°C, green tea (non-fermented tea leaves) should be brewed around 80°C to avoid it being bitter and white tea (young, non-fermented tea leaves) is best at around 70°C.
I mean it’s interesting that this is generally the case with many (or even most) words across languages… But I’d wager it’s more the norm than the exception, so I don’t know if “boiling water” is that interesting of an example.
Some are better than others. Many semi-transparents could get legit coverage. And many are good fodder for word game content.
The rest of the article did a good job explaining that. I just think those were terrible examples for the introduction. I think "shut up", "good night", and "hot dog" would have really got the point across better, but those might already be in dictionaries.
They're clearly a bit over-zealous bout what examples they think have meaning. They cite substitution as a good test for a phrase but double down on boiling water.
> Lexicographers used a substitutability test: if you can swap synonyms freely, it’s not a lexical unit. “Cold feet” (meaning fear) can’t become “frigid feet”—so it gets an entry. But the test cuts both ways. You can say “boiling water” but not “seething water” or “raging water.” The phrase resists substitution too.
These aren't failures for substitution because "Raging" isn't' a synonym in this case. where frigid would be a reasonable.
I wonder perhaps if the author is confusing the idiom "hot water" which is in there https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hot_water and would fail the substitution test.
I removed that sentence/claim, I see the point that "boiling" and "raging" was a bad example.
Cool, going back over them I'm actually surprised at the strength of the substitution test, thus far I haven't really encountered one that strongly goes against the test if a suitable synonym is picked.
There are a few things for which English simply doesn't have anything to substitute and those are harder to assess. boiling is one but so would "blood" in "blood pressure", obviously replacing it with another liquid has basically the same meaning eg water pressure, oil pressure but as far as I can tell there's literally no synonym for blood.
I those cases I try to use a stand in from another language to see of the substitution works. for for example "sangre" in Spanish so "sangre pressure" which doesn't seem to affect it's meaning much so I'd argue it's exclusion.
Conversely "Red tape" cannot be "roja tape" and a "caliente dog" is one trapped in a car not a food.
"Simmering H20", for all that simmering isn't quite the same as boiling, is pretty clearly more or less identical to boiling water.
Yeah, the good examples are usually in dictionaries as headwords, the moderate examples are usually in dictionaries as phrases within the entry for one (or more) of the words that comprise them, leaving fairly weak examples actually “missing” if you want to use “missing words with spaces” as the basis for content.
Fair point. I just rewrote the intro w/ the naming-function argument first.
'hot dog' belongs in a thesaurus, not a dictionary. It's just a type of sausage.
A dictionary is an enumeration of words. A thesaurus is a mapping between existing words.
Every word in a thesaurus belongs in a dictionary.
It’s a type of sausage, but they are definitely not synonymous. At least not in American English.
All words in a thesaurus would generally also be in a dictionary? The difference between a thesaurus and a dictionary is what each tells you about a word.
In the US, if you ordered a hot dog and got a sausage (or vice versa), it would be very reasonable to return the item and ask for something else. They are culturally completely different, the same way Cheerios in milk is not another cold soup like gazpacho is.
The first two I kind of understand what the author means. But "help me" and "severe pain" made me think that I'm just not the right public for this text.
I don’t see how boiling water could ever be a single word. Would that mean we need entries for every other liquid boiling?
i guess Saturday night could have some extra details explaining the context around our standard work week. But even that is a stretch.
A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water.
It likely could apply to other liquids in the same mixed state, but would be assumed to refer to water (or solutions or colloidal mixtures primarily consisting of water) in common speech.
Water is extremely common, and has anonymously high heats of crystalization and vaporization, so it is the most common example of a mixed phase system and the only one most people encounter in everyday life.
Inuktitut / Kalaallisut (Greenlandic):
Central Alaskan Yup’ik>"Boiling water" ... I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.
Yeah, I agree! Fuck ICE!
sometimes singular semantic concepts can take multiple syntactic words to express. Why not call this idea something other than “word”?
We could call it a "phrase".
As far as my limited knowledge of linguistics goes, the technical term is actually "collocations."
To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach.
I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did!
(Before any LLM zealots attack me, yes, it is now possible to have a more exhaustive list of collocations thanks to LLMs. This doesn't contradict my point.)
Examples of collocation dictionaries:
https://www.freecollocation.com/
https://ozdic.com/.
AIUI, collocations are just "words that often go together". It doesn't signal any unconventional meaning to the construction, that would make it a proper idiom.
If that were the case, there would be no need for collocation dictionaries :)
If the compound words all have single word entries in the dictionary that when combined mean the same thing what is the point?
Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid
Boiling: having reached the boiling point
Boiling Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid which has reached the boiling point
If Boiling Water had some other completely different meaning that has nothing to do with the individual words then sure, maybe, otherwise this is completely redundant and opinionated.
As an English native, I'd rather see proper nouns in a dictionary before seeing "compound words".
Personally, I don't agree that "boiling water" is a word (with a space) - I would refer to it as a phrase if it had specific meaning, but it just seems like an ordinary pairing of adjective and noun. Also, if a word can contain a space, then what is the meaning of "words" as there doesn't seem an easy way to distinguish between a "compound word" and a common phrase. Is "barking dog" a pair of words, a compound word or a phrase? (It's a pair of words in my mind)
The name for these are "collocations".
Collocation dictionaries are lists of collocations. The reason they're absent from single word dictionaries is because there's about 25x more collocations than single words.
And fittingly enough, "collocation dictionary" is not in "the" dictionary. At least not the OED.
Presumably if the word thesaurus was actually "synonym dictionary" it would likewise be absent.
While 'this analysis would not have been possible without LLM', I am not sure the LLM analysis was well reviewed after it has been done. From the obscure/familiar word list, some of the n-grams, e.g. "is resource", "seq size", "db xref" surely happen in the wild (we well know), but I would doubt that we can argue they are missing from the dictionary. Knowing the realm, I would argue none of them are words, not even collocations. If "is resource" is, why not, "has resource"? So while the path is surely interesting, this analysis does miss scrutiny, which you would expect from a high-level LLM analysis.
The very bottom of the slider is there to illustrate where LLM artifacts and Wiktionary noise live — it's not presented as legitimate vocabulary. The slider lets you see the full quality gradient, including where it breaks down.
That's not really mentioned in the article, though. As far as the article is concerned, the right side of that slider is valid-but-possibly-too-rare-to-be-interesting, when in fact it's just garbage. This does not sell the concept well.
Examples of "obscure" compound words include "list uids", "beg pos", "sync binlog", "gfp mask", "av fetch", "str idx", "seq ptr", "ai family", "fmt vuln", "ai socktype", "curr tok", "nbits set", "ini get", "s1 s2", "in addr", "num get", "res init", "sess ref", and "ai addrlen".
Well I can't even.
This is just so hilarious. They'll eventually have to add "man man" to the list.
On my first encounter with a Unix machine (an SGI IRC) I had heard that system help was available with the "man" command, so I typed "man"; the resulting "apropro what?" made me laugh out loud, and the other people in the room looked at me like I was some kind of idiot.
This boils down to an "is Pluto a planet" debate.
We act as if some languages have "compound words" that can encompass entire sentences (subject & object attaching to the verb as prefixes or suffixes) while others don't form compounds, and most are somewhere in between. But these are all statements about lexicographic conventions and say nothing about the languages. In reality all languages are muddles sprawling across a multidimensional continuum, and they abso-frigging-lutely do n't sit neatly in such pigeonholes.
This is a great comparison. We're arguing about the definition of "word", and attempting to expand it to include edge cases where two words with separate meanings have a different atomic meaning when combined.
We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.
Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.
I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.
I don't think 'Words with spaces' is a thing.
I think maybe the word the author is looking for is 'phrase'
It’s probably a thing, especially with loan-words (eg.: “avant garde”), and there are probably much better examples… But the examples in the article make no sense to me.
The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed.
The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.
We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.
"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.
I disagree that "saturday night" ever means anything other than the literal meaning of the nighttime of the day of saturday.
You can argue that there's a connotative association with the phrase. Sure. Just like "beach weather", or "blizzard conditions". But that doesn't make "saturday night" special in any way.
I am with you on the literal definition there.
I wonder if the connotative association is exactly what we are trying to capture here though, and if those other phrases also fit in at the "separate words but slightly special" end of the spectrum.
There is meaning being communicated in all of those phrases that would be obvious to most or all people who are embedded in the language and culture where they are used, and which transcends the definitions of the individual words themselves.
It seems that there are several axis here -- how explicit is meaning, how atomic, how literal, how substitutable are the individual words -- and all vary continuously.
That might all seem needlessly pedantic for the question of "should it warrant a dictionary entry", but if you are trying to extract all information encoded in a verbal exchange, they might be useful concepts.
It's an evocative phrase. It definitely means different things to different people though. Teenager vs adult, single vs married, employed vs not.
Or how about "Sunday morning"? It's evocative for sure. But very differently for different groups.
Or "island breeze". Stirs up images and feelings. But the definition is literal and the connotations are somewhat personal.
I'd argue that none of these phrases belong in a dictionary. Possibly explicitly because the "missing" meanings are the associative connotations, but those vary for different people, so what's the canonical definition?
Imagine configuring your word separator like this: " `~!@#$%^&*()-=+[{]}\|;:'",.<>/?"
I think 'phraseme' is closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme
I imagine that languages like german that create composites of nouns have less of a problem with this:
English: cream of mushroom soup
Spanisch: sopa cremosa de champiñones
German: Champignoncremesuppe
I just checked, Champignoncremesuppe is not in my dictionary ;)
It has some compound words. But including too many of them would quickly get out of hand
Cremesuppe is in the first dictionary that I looked in. But including every kind of Cremesuppe would have been too much.
You are right! So the situation for german is worse: Millions of words are missing... ;-)
but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary.
Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"
not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".
More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?
Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?
It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.
In general, transparent compounds, i.e. those whose meaning can be derived from the elements, are not in the dictionary. Mushroom soup is transparent; Krankenhaus, which means hospital, but is literally sick-people home, isn't.
In Dutch we indeed happily do this even for English loanwords like "creditcard" or something more obscure like "lockpick". When in doubt, remove the space.
That happens often with domain names, but then you get expertsexchange.com, penisland.net, whorepresents.com, therapistfinder.com, a Dutch pre-match analysis site voorspel.nl, or a site about the game overspel.nl.
Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs&t=1477s
Not to mention Tobias Fünke’s analyst + therapist web site, analrapist.com.
"book steaks" is in the list, but I don't think it' real. Maybe it was supposed to be "stack".
Hah, I wonder how thick a German, Dutch or Afrikaans dictionary would be if it included all possible spaceless compound words. Literally any concept can be compounded together to make a new word.
Roovleisslaghuisinspekteur =
Rooi = red
Vleis = meat
Slag = butcher
Huis = house
Inspekteur = inspector
"Inspector who controls the quality of red meat in butcheries"
>Spanish carves up time with precision English lacks: madrugada for the pre-dawn hours, atardecer for late afternoon waning into evening. The mid-day nap was so compelling we adopted the siesta into English.
"I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening -- or the mid evening. Just the early evening, mid evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early midafternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning... But never at dusk." -Steve Martin
“Hospital bills”. That’s very country specific. Also, that’s two words.
Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean.
Some cases are basically impossible "Crash blossoms" you don't stand any chance without knowing why we call them that
Some are middling difficult, "Home Secretary" requires that you know every meaning for the two words and then you happen to pick the correct obscure meaning, a "Secretary" could be in charge, and "Home" could mean the entire country as distinct from everywhere else.
But "Hospital bills" doesn't seem even marginally difficult
I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.
But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.
> But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger
Ginger ale is in fact, not an ale, it's a soft drink. It is distantly related to Ginger Beer and some variants of Ginger Beer are alcoholic like ales, but Ginger ale was conceived as a soft drink and today continues as a soft drink.
My (likely ignorant) understanding was that the non-alcoholic "ale"s and "beer"s were fermented like their traditional versions, but the process was stopped before the ethanol level became significant.
Mass-market ginger ales and root beers are not made that way today, of course.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between this compound word concept and idioms. Both are largely atomic, defy analysis via individual word definition, and fairly language (and culture or dialect) specific.
Dictionaries are also language specific. We don't necessarily expect a 1:1 mapping of words between languages. I have personally always wondered if this subtley shapes thoughts in different languages as well.
I think it's more than overlap -- they are the same thing.
I.e. AFAICT, all compound words that defy literal interpretation are idioms. And it's that simple.
The argument then becomes that idioms should be in the dictionary. Some of them are of course, but idioms and slang are a) fast-moving, and b) often dismissed by the sorts of people who edit dictionaries.
I tend to agree. The definitions overlap perfectly.
At the same time, I am having intuitive issues seeing "hot dog" as an idiom, vs just an ordinary noun. It certainly seems to follow noun rules, and fit into speech as one.
I don't know for sure that it's NOT an idiom though. I could just be wrong here, and have intuition in need of calibration.
No, I think you're right -- "hot dog" started out as a colloquial name for a type of sausage (apparently as something of a joke, because dog meat was sometimes eaten in the area, and it was a low-quality product), and it is now the accepted name.
So it was an idiom, now it's canon.
Another good one might be "hot dish", which has an idiomatic meaning in the midwestern US, and is slowly spreading. Not sure if it's made it to the dictionary yet. (which dictionary becomes an important question -- I'd expect to see it in M-W before, say, OED)
In most English speaking countries it's a far from common phrase (ie. it's very USA-centric).
OK. But is the meaning any less literally-obvious than "grocery bills" or "electricity bills"?
Maybe you don't have "hospital bills". I don't have "landscaping bills", but I know exactly what they are.
Sure, but my main intent was to raise the question as to why it was singled out in the article/blog post as something that needs to be in the dictionary.
As you've pointed out, the word "bills" clarifies what it is. I don't see why every combination needs to be in a dictionary. The list would be incredibly long, eg. "phone bills" or "power bills", etc.
I think we agree then. I assumed you were arguing for inclusion in a dictionary because its meaning was not obvious.
What does it mean?
It's what your insurance gets from the hospital after they provided a service to you.
At the moment, I'm in the hospital. I've been here since 0500 Friday morning. I should be released tomorrow, Tuesday. During those five days I've had services from doctors, nurses, technicians and [everybody else necessary to run a hospital]. There were multiple uses of CT scanners, ultrasounds and many machines which go Bing!. Also, a surgical operating suite, of which I remember about 60 seconds of very bright white lights and very large-screen monitors suspended from ridiculously heavy-duty supports. Like, you could safely dangle four football players of your choice (gridiron, rugby or association, doesn't matter) from them.
A team of people will compile a bill for all of those services. The bill will be presented to the insurance company whose card I showed Friday morning. It will likely be less than a million dollars, but it could easily be more than a hundred thousand dollars. That's the right order of magnitude to consider: a good percentage of a house, maybe a very large nice house.
The insurance company will claim that some of these charges are too much. The hospital knows this, and there are three mechanisms in which they justify their prices. First, although the two Tums antacids have a street value of eighteen cents when you buy it over the counter in quantity fifty, the hospital buys them in blister-packs so to avoid cross-contamination until they reach the patient. Second, it is customary to pretend that only the services which a patient actually used can be charged for, so the in-house plumber, the gas plumbers, the cryogenic fluids specialists, the oxidizing gases technicians, the potable water testers, and the electricians among a cast of thousand all need to be paid for.
And third, there's emergency care for the uninsured.
The US is cruel, but not stupid. No, I lie, it is frequently both cruel and stupid, always to people already disadvantaged in some other way. As a matter of law, a hospital can't turn away or discharge a person who is likely to die without treatment, even if they can't pay. But the government doesn't provide money to pay for that.
Finally, most hospitals or hospital systems in the US are run by for-profit private companies. I won't mention organized crime in the same sentence, but one can reasonably presume that the two are interchangeable in terms of law-abidingness and willingness to trade down ethics for an increase in profits.
So, having created the bill and sent it to an insurance company, they will argue back and forth and finally some portion of the money will eventually be transferred and everyone will be more or less happy, right?
No. Because in the US, the standard for healthcare insurance is to avoid the moral hazard of people attempting to get too much healthcare by having the insurance company bill the patient.
Remember the bill that started out as the same scale as a house? 10% "coinsurance" is often considered generous. 20% is pretty normal. Some specific services will be called out with specific fees, and others may be "disallowed" -- and sent through entirely to the patient.
That's on top of the monthly payments that have already happened.
But I work for a tech company with an unusually enlightened attitude, so I expect that my family's fiscal impact from this bout of medical intervention will be limited to the parking fees that my wife paid when she came to visit me.
It's privilege, but I'd rather that the system be reformed so that everybody got it.
Dictionaries are a mixed bag at best. If you apply David Kaplan’s character/content distinction from Demonstratives, you have to ask: should pure indexicals, which are essentially 'contentless' pointers be treated the same way as standard words? Let alone the thousands of rigid designators in this dataset that map directly to specific objects in the real world. At a certain point, is there no room left for encyclopedias?
I got into solving the NYT crossword during Covid. I couldn’t solve a Monday when I started; now I do Mondays downs-only and look forward to Saturdays. Along the way, I developed a sixth sense for when an answer will be more than one word. I’ve thought a lot about it and can’t really describe how I do it. (Some other puzzles clarify if an answer spans multiple words, but I find the ambiguity adds to the fun.)
Do you think this comes from a gradual internalization of a real linguistic concept? Or it more a familiarity with common (if unspoken) conventions of the puzzle makers?
I suspect the answer isn't binary, but it's interesting to think about.
This "sixth sense" phenomenon seems to pop up a lot. Crosswords are a great example. The sense some people are getting for detecting LLM output might be another.
A mixture of melting ice and water suitable for drinking has a word: ice water. It's not a adjective noun phrase. It has a more specific meaning than just the two words together. You can order an ice water at a restaurant
Freezing water doesn't have a word, it only gets one after water has changed phase. Boiling water also gets a word once it has changed phase: steam.
ice - water - steam
Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas; water in the gas phase is “water vapor” which also doesn't have a single word.
This is also an interesting case because “vapor” without a qualifier also refers to a suspension of solid or liquid particles in gas (of which “steam” is a particular example).
"Steam" is very definitely the gas phase of water. Water vapor is too. If we are talking about chemistry they are essentially synonyms.
If we are talking engineering, the term steam generally implies water vapor that is at or above the saturation temperature.
In every day usage they are usually drawing a distinction between visible and invisible water vapor, usually caused by the presence of liquid droplets, with "steam" being essentially "fog", but hotter.
"Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas": You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants). I was Main Propulsion Assistant on a steam powered destroyer, and I can assure you that every effort is made to prevent droplets being suspended in the steam--because such droplets erode the blades on steam turbines. To that end, steam coming out of the stem drum (the upper part of the boiler) is run through superheaters, which raise the temperature of the incoming steam to evaporate any droplets. On our ship, the steam coming off the steam drum was a bit over 1200 psi and 600 some degrees Fahrenheit. After it goes through the superheaters, it's about the same pressure but 975 degrees.
And there's effectively no other gas in the steam, because dissolved air in the boiler's feedwater (particularly oxygen and carbon dioxide) has to be removed to prevent corrosion. To that end, water going into the boiler is first run through a deaerator, to remove any air that dissolved in the water as it came through the condensor.
> You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants
Well, that's true, I haven't, BUT still I went back and forth writing and deleting and rewriting and eventually deleting a whole digression about the special case of the jargon of steam power and how it uses “wet steam” (or “saturated steam”) for “steam” in the general use sense and “dry steam” for “water vapor” and “superheated steam” for dry steam created by heating wet steam away from contact with water, before deciding that was way too much, but, yeah, that's all true. (And, in details about the actual processes used, a lot more than I knew or would have gone into even if I had and had decided to keep the digression.)
Nope, water vapour is the gas phase of water mixed with other gases while steam is just the gas phase of water. Water vapour can condense into tiny droplets which can freeze into ice crystals, both of which are visible as 'clouds'. Steam is not visible until it condenses into droplets at which point it no longer is steam but water suspended in another medium, usually air.
this is an interesting distinction that i was unaware of.
Right. (I’m not sure if you’re aware but that’s exactly what I said.)
Almost but not exactly, 'boiled water' can go two ways: phase changed to steam (at which point is is no longer 'boiled water') or boiled and cooled again. Pedantic? Sure. Fits right in here? Absolutely.
"to be" is a very weird example because that's just the full infinitive of "be" which is definitely in dictionaries: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be
These are under-respected for non native English speakers.
Can you say more on this?
Consider phrasal verbs like "shut up", "get lost" or "kick off". Knowing what the parts mean doesn't let you understand the whole.
In your native tongue you take these for granted, but in a second language you have to learn that the sum is more (or different) than the parts.
Phrasal verbs are listed under the main verb. I never ever had a problem with that. As a native speaker sometimes I still have to search for some in some strange context.
These are called idiomatic phrases, and many (all natural?) languages have them, and, yes, they are pitfalls for language learners.
These particular examples are figures of speech, so "shut" in "shut up" still means the same thing it would mean in "shut the door." And "up" is used the same way as "cover up."
So the issue is just that this is figurative language, and you have to know that a kickoff is the beginning of certain sports, for example. It's more of a cultural issue than something a dictionary needs to fix.
They don't get into enough learning lists, and from my perspective, they are great additions to word games because the more transparent compounds are unique and legit words that can more than double the accessible vocabulary.
Fascinating! I’d add “word nerd” to the list to describe the authors.
Clearly those Irish monks are to blame.
Very cool project! Reminds me Chiang's great short story 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling':
> “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. Thatʼs why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?
> “But you speak slowly because youʼre a foreigner. Iʼm Tiv, so I donʼt pause when I speak. Shouldnʼt my writing be the same?”
With Twain in mind, might I suggest we adopt the simple expedient of snake casing such terms.
Finally, someone who actually thought about where to draw the line instead of rejecting words with spaces entirely.
On another note, I always wished "never mind" was spelled "nevermind"
"Each other" is like that for me, and according to search results, a lot of other people. I pronounce it ee-chother.
"Eachother" feels as natural as "somebody", "nobody", "anybody" to me
"Opaque MWE"? Does no one know the word "idiom"?