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I think it’s a bit odd that “doorbell camera” gets its own entry. It’s pretty self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the words doorbell and camera. Is “ceilin

I think it’s a bit odd that “doorbell camera” gets its own entry. It’s pretty self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the words doorbell and camera. Is “ceiling fan” in the dictionary?

BrissyCoder 5y ago
Thought the same thing wrt "vaccine passport".
- zuminator 5y ago
  Compound phrases are only obvious if you know the context they inhabit. Perhaps in an alternate timeline, "vaccine passport" is the practice of traveling abroad for the purpose of getting medical care unavailable in your own country (what we here on ol' Earth-616 refer to as medical tourism[0]); in yet another timeline "vaccine passport" means an actual evil-Bill-Gates style ID-nanochip injected into you and required for travel. Similarly, alt-Earth's "bit rot" is an equine gum disease, "air fryer" is a slang synonym for a smoking-fast fastball; and so on. Anyway, part of the usefulness of dictionaries is to preserve today's meaning for posterity, when what consider to be obvious context may no longer be widely known. The Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, one of the earliest English language dictionaries from 1708, included compound phrases like the "Ropes of a Ship," which meant pretty much exactly what you would think it meant, but also phrases like "Equivocal Generation"[1] which might sound to contemporary ears like it's referring to hipsters or something, but actually means something totally different. [0]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/medical-tourism https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/medic... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
tingletech 5y ago
I’m a fan of ceilings. Love them.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Touché, Amelia Bedelia ;) perhaps it’s not as obvious as I thought!
cronix 5y ago
I think it's odd that acronyms or any multi-word "word" (if you can logically call it that) gets an entry into the dictionary, which I thought was to define individual words.
- Asraelite 5y ago
  Multi-word terms get entries if their meaning is unpredictable in some way. For example, "red herring" should get an entry but "blue herring" doesn't, because it's just a herring that's blue. The purpose of a dictionary is not to define individual words. In fact, it's not meant to define anything. It's meant to objectively capture the ways language is used today, with the primary intent of being used as a tool to help people understand things. If you read or hear a sentence containing a particular term that you're unfamiliar with then a dictionary will help you to understand the intended meaning of the sentence. Acronyms, idioms, compound terms, and even punctuation are just as necessary for understanding as standalone words, so there's no reason not to include them.
naniwaduni 5y ago
Yeah, half a whit of sense will tell you that a doorbell camera is the kind of camera rigged to take a picture at the press of a button, and ceiling fan is entertainment jargon for the equivalent of casinos call whales. When you put two nouns next to each other, it's not remotely obvious what the relation between the two is unless you just already know.

I think it’s a bit odd that “doorbell camera” gets its own entry. It’s pretty self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the words doorbell and camera. Is “ceiling fan” in the dictionary?

BrissyCoder 5y ago

Thought the same thing wrt "vaccine passport".

zuminator 5y ago
Compound phrases are only obvious if you know the context they inhabit. Perhaps in an alternate timeline, "vaccine passport" is the practice of traveling abroad for the purpose of getting medical care unavailable in your own country (what we here on ol' Earth-616 refer to as medical tourism[0]); in yet another timeline "vaccine passport" means an actual evil-Bill-Gates style ID-nanochip injected into you and required for travel. Similarly, alt-Earth's "bit rot" is an equine gum disease, "air fryer" is a slang synonym for a smoking-fast fastball; and so on. Anyway, part of the usefulness of dictionaries is to preserve today's meaning for posterity, when what consider to be obvious context may no longer be widely known. The Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, one of the earliest English language dictionaries from 1708, included compound phrases like the "Ropes of a Ship," which meant pretty much exactly what you would think it meant, but also phrases like "Equivocal Generation"[1] which might sound to contemporary ears like it's referring to hipsters or something, but actually means something totally different. [0]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/medical-tourism https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/medic... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

tingletech 5y ago

I’m a fan of ceilings. Love them.

elliekelly 5y ago
Touché, Amelia Bedelia ;) perhaps it’s not as obvious as I thought!

cronix 5y ago

I think it's odd that acronyms or any multi-word "word" (if you can logically call it that) gets an entry into the dictionary, which I thought was to define individual words.

Asraelite 5y ago
Multi-word terms get entries if their meaning is unpredictable in some way. For example, "red herring" should get an entry but "blue herring" doesn't, because it's just a herring that's blue. The purpose of a dictionary is not to define individual words. In fact, it's not meant to define anything. It's meant to objectively capture the ways language is used today, with the primary intent of being used as a tool to help people understand things. If you read or hear a sentence containing a particular term that you're unfamiliar with then a dictionary will help you to understand the intended meaning of the sentence. Acronyms, idioms, compound terms, and even punctuation are just as necessary for understanding as standalone words, so there's no reason not to include them.

naniwaduni 5y ago

Yeah, half a whit of sense will tell you that a doorbell camera is the kind of camera rigged to take a picture at the press of a button, and ceiling fan is entertainment jargon for the equivalent of casinos call whales. When you put two nouns next to each other, it's not remotely obvious what the relation between the two is unless you just already know.