Wordnik.com: The Grandiloquent Dictionary<::I> less such words which are also included in at least one of several other dictionaries: Comments

Comment by telofy, 10 months ago

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:23:26 +0000
Sure.
But it wouldn't be bases solely on your opinion; before I knew how huge the list would (still) be, I planned it just as a temporary container destined to be tuned into a little list in the comma separated sense inside the Grandiloquent Dictionary list's description. I thought there might be ten or twenty errors to be found or something like that. In order to retain these comments it would also be possible to recycle this list for something entirely different.

Comment by sionnach, 10 months ago

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:12:29 +0000
telofy: hi again!

I like the name change for the list. But I would hate for you to take any drastic purging action based only on a single comment from me. It would be interesting to hear comments from other Wordies. As I'm sure you've noticed, there is no shortage of opinions on the site.

Cheers

Comment by telofy, 10 months ago

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:50:11 +0000
I'd be the last one to disqualify any combination of letters as not "being a word" just on the basis that it's not in this or that dictionary. One or two years ago I've been introduced to the world of logophilia by blogs, articles and videos by/of Erin McKean and obviously through the works of Gene Wolfe, so I abandoned the notion of a dictionary being some sort of word police even before it had any chance of manifesting itself. The whole purpose of this list was that at some point mollusque informed me that this Grandiloquent Dictionary contained quite a lot of errors (referring to stuff like -phillia). Being inclined towards perfectionism this bugged be, so I had to figure of a way to detect those errors. Only 2700 words are a bit much for me to look though by hand so I decided to write a program that could screen out all words which are guaranteed to be correct. My hope was to be left with a list of at most one hundred words, which would then be rather easy to look through manually. Unfortunately it didn't work out like that, so I more or less abandoned the project.
After a few months I let a script search through all the word pages looking for the tag "misspelling". Those are the words listed in the description of the other list.

Since this automated dictionary search failed to provide my with an agreeably shrunken number of words, I always planned on deleting this list for its utter uselessness. I didn't realize that it could be interpreted as sacrilege upon our sacred art of neologation (or the like). Even more reason to perform this sort of ablution on my lists list...

Edit: Until I decide what to do with this list, I've slightly changed the description up there. Could someone please have a quick look at the grammar? Some parts feel rather ambiguous...

Comment by sionnach, 10 months ago

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:07:23 +0000
Hi telofy!

I've never understood exactly what it is you are trying to achieve with this particular list. Granted, it's made a little more sense since you added a check against the OED, but I have to wonder how informative all the computer checking really is. A little applied commonsense would seem to be far more useful. For instance:

It seems straightforward to judge entries on the list ending in 'phillia' as misspellings, since the suffix 'philia' is standard for words of this kind.

What about the various 'phobias'? It doesn't seem entirely warranted to dismiss them out of hand for not being in dictionary X, Y, or Z - after all, the construction/invention of words in this class is kind of accepted as a wordlover's parlor game that has been going on for decades, if not centuries. Even if it's not in another dictionary, so what? If I know that tyrotoxism is a legitimate word, and that the prefix tyro has to do with cheese, why is that not sufficient to legitimize tyrophobia and tyrophilia? In similar vein, staurophobia may not have found a computer match in your search, but it is listed and defined in this online dictionary , for instance.

Some words may not be listed elsewhere, but still have a kind of legitimacy - there is a philosophical issue here about what is acceptable, I suppose. A nice discussion of this point can be found in the Word Detective's discussion of strikhedonia.

Then what about words such as tarantismus, which seems like nothing more than an obvious variant of tarantism? tritavia is in the Stirps Romana, and thus probably makes it into accepted legal parlance for that reason.

I guess my overall point is that, having run the computer matching checks (for which the selection of other dictionaries seems more than a little arbitrary), one still reaches a point where it really only makes sense to look at each word on an individual basis. But even then, I can't see necessarily 'disqualifying' some of these words just because they are not listed elsewhere.

I'm sorry to have yakked on so much and (perhaps) to seem unduly critical - I've really been enjoying your contributions to the site. It's just that this list has always bothered me to some extent - probably because the name seems to go a little farther than seems warranted.

Anyway, I'll shut up now, I promise.

(on edit): in case it isn't obvious, my comments were based on the 100 most recently added words only.