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According to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than
by my_first_acct 9y ago
According to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings'. Other common words with huge numbers of meanings include "put" and "set".
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with-most-meanings https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...
- Nition 9y agoAnd I'm sure some of those are obscure meanings, but the likelihood is I'm never going to look them up. Exclude those many definitions of "run" and either make the dictionary a bit smaller (easier to search) or include several rare word definitions in the same space.
- dragonwriter 9y agoRemoving a handful of thousands of common words won't make the OED noticeably shorter, and it's not space constrained anyway. And I don't think a rare use of a common word is any less likely to be looked up than a rare word.
- Nition 9y agoI don't mean the full OED. Personally I have a Pocket Oxford and a Concise Oxford. Both are space constrained. The Pocket Oxford in particular has around 60,000 words so leaving out the most common 5-10K would make a noticeable difference. Since it's the complex words that get left out in small dictionaries, as you decrease dictionary size, the size saving that you'd get from removing common words proportionally increases. But you might be right that it wouldn't make enough of a difference, since small dictionaries can also fit less words in total. It might never be enough to matter much.