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Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• happycat5000 7mo ago
  These are under-respected for non native English speakers.
  • grantpitt 7mo ago
    Can you say more on this?
    • hrnnnnnn 7mo ago
      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.
      • f1shy 7mo ago
        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.
      • dragonwriter 7mo ago
        These are called idiomatic phrases, and many (all natural?) languages have them, and, yes, they are pitfalls for language learners.
      • smt88 7mo ago
        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.
    • gligierko 7mo ago
      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.
• ndr42 7mo ago
  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
  • looperhacks 7mo ago
    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
    • ndr42 7mo ago
      You are right! So the situation for german is worse: Millions of words are missing... ;-)
    • adrian_b 7mo ago
      Cremesuppe is in the first dictionary that I looked in. But including every kind of Cremesuppe would have been too much.
  • ticulatedspline 7mo ago
    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"
    • Wobbles42 7mo ago
      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.
      • 7mo ago
• grantpitt 7mo ago
  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?”
• anotherhue 7mo ago
  Clearly those Irish monks are to blame.
• retr0rocket 7mo ago
  [dead]
• dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
  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.
  • gligierko 7mo ago
    Some are better than others. Many semi-transparents could get legit coverage. And many are good fodder for word game content.
    • dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
      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.
      • ticulatedspline 7mo ago
        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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hot_water and would fail the substitution test.
        • gligierko 7mo ago
          I removed that sentence/claim, I see the point that "boiling" and "raging" was a bad example.
• kgwgk 7mo ago
  > Got a word Didn’t > frozen water → ice boiling water Freezing water doesn’t have a word. Boiled water does have a word.
  • hagbard_c 7mo ago
    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
    • kgwgk 7mo ago
      Right. (I’m not sure if you’re aware but that’s exactly what I said.)
      • hagbard_c 7mo ago
        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.
    • dragonwriter 7mo ago
      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).
      • dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
        this is an interesting distinction that i was unaware of.
      • mcswell 7mo ago
        "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.
• aaroninsf 7mo ago
  With Twain in mind, might I suggest we adopt the simple expedient of snake casing such terms.
  • pvillano 7mo ago
    Finally, someone who actually thought about where to draw the line instead of rejecting words with spaces entirely.
• below43 7mo ago
  “Hospital bills”. That’s very country specific. Also, that’s two words.
  • soperj 7mo ago
    What does it mean?
    • eternauta3k 7mo ago
      It's what your insurance gets from the hospital after they provided a service to you.
    • dsr_ 7mo ago
      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.
• kelseyfrog 7mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • georgefrowny 7mo ago
    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.
  • michaeld123 7mo ago
    You and Shorel were both right — added it. Thanks -- the lexicographers like https://www.sketchengine.eu https://www.sketchengine.eu
• danesparza 7mo ago
  I don't think 'Words with spaces' is a thing. I think maybe the word the author is looking for is 'phrase'
  • epgui 7mo ago
    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.
  • alecbz 7mo ago
    I think 'phraseme' is closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme
  • Wobbles42 7mo ago
    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.
    • quesera 7mo ago
      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.
      • Wobbles42 7mo ago
        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.
• thmpp 7mo ago
  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.
  • michaeld123 7mo ago
    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.
    • exmadscientist 7mo ago
      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.
      • michaeld123 7mo ago
        You were right — it is now. Thanks
• JackFr 7mo ago
  "Opaque MWE"? Does no one know the word "idiom"?
• hmokiguess 7mo ago
  On another note, I always wished "never mind" was spelled "nevermind"
  • pvillano 7mo ago
    "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
    • rererereferred 7mo ago
      Because of the vowel following consonants, my mind splits that word into these syllables: Ea-cho-ther, so not as natural as those other words. Then again, it's English, the only rule is there's no rules.
• AlotOfReading 7mo ago
  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 https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hot-dog_n [1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/goodnight_n https://www.oed.com/dictionary/goodnight_n
  • BergAndCo 7mo ago
    [dead]
• johnhamlin 7mo ago
  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.)
  • Wobbles42 7mo ago
    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.
• speak_plainly 7mo ago
  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?
• johnhamlin 7mo ago
  Fascinating! I’d add “word nerd” to the list to describe the authors.
• alecbz 7mo ago
  "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 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be
• MarkusQ 7mo ago
  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.
  • Wobbles42 7mo ago
    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.
• beAbU 7mo ago
  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"
• voidUpdate 7mo ago
  > “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"
  • 5o1ecist 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • globular-toast 7mo ago
      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.
      • 5o1ecist 7mo ago
        [flagged]
    • 9rx 7mo ago
      > I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that two words Which are the two words? ["water that's", "boiling"] ["water", "that's boiling"] ["water that", "s boiling"] Something else?
      • Petersipoi 7mo ago
        I think the two words are ["stop being", "pedantic"]
        • Supermancho 7mo ago
          The point of this discussion is pedantry.
• WesolyKubeczek 7mo ago
  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.
  • csmantle 7mo ago
    This is just so hilarious. They'll eventually have to add "man man" to the list.
    • jjgreen 7mo ago
      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.
  • michaeld123 7mo ago
    Yeah — added a note below the slider that the obscure end is noise (LLM artifacts, jargon fragments, Wiktionary debris) and that where to draw the line is up to the reader. It was always intended to show the full gradient including where it breaks down, but that wasn't stated
  • floxy 7mo ago
    How in the world does "int argc" not make the list? But good to know that "frit flies" does.
• DonHopkins 7mo ago
  >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
• Shorel 7mo ago
  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://www.freecollocation.com/ https://ozdic.com/ https://ozdic.com/.
  • zozbot234 7mo ago
    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.
    • Shorel 7mo ago
      If that were the case, there would be no need for collocation dictionaries :)
  • michaeld123 7mo ago
    Fair point — added a mention of collocations
• harperlee 7mo ago
  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_Tertius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
  • michaeld123 7mo ago
    Added a note: "'I love you' isn't opaque, but it's tight enough to put on a tile." The familiar end of the spectrum picks up collocations that are transparent but loaded — I'm not claiming they're words in the traditional sense, but they're useful vocabulary for word games, which is where I'm coming from.
    • medalblue 7mo ago
      I thought that sentence seemed out of place when I read it. Didn't realize this was all AI slop. It all makes sense now.
    • vunderba 7mo ago
      > "'I love you' isn't opaque, but it's tight enough to put on a tile." The problem with introducing phrase/sentences into a word game (let's take Scrabble) is that you'd spend half the night with your friends arguing over what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency?
      • wredcoll 7mo ago
        > what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency? How do you suppose we determine acceptability now?
• riffraff 7mo ago
  "book steaks" is in the list, but I don't think it' real. Maybe it was supposed to be "stack".
• oh_my_goodness 7mo ago
  If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.
  • michaeld123 7mo ago
    Ha — you're probably right that it would have been less controversial. But I kept it precisely because it's arguable. Added a parenthetical acknowledging the HN debate and framing it as on-the-fence by design
    • harperlee 7mo ago
      Hey Michael, great project! If you don't mind me testing you, as a word game builder, what do you think about the latest developments of international policies?
      • michaeld123 7mo ago
        Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
  • globular-toast 7mo ago
    Sure, but monkey wrench is in the dictionary. Heck, it's even in my printed copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
  • 9rx 7mo ago
    "Monkey wrench" is a word already found in the dictionary, so it wouldn't be a useful example. It already met the bar. The article is questioning why some words don't meet the bar for inclusion in the dictionary. The word "boiling water" is one such word that it sees as being on the fence. The comments here demonstrate exactly why it is on the fence, but it remains unclear exactly what would be necessary for it to tip towards inclusion.
    • OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
• invalidusernam3 7mo ago
  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.
  • ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago
    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)
• vintermann 7mo ago
  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.
• gcr 7mo ago
  sometimes singular semantic concepts can take multiple syntactic words to express. Why not call this idea something other than “word”?
  • bombcar 7mo ago
    We could call it a "phrase".
• HardwareLust 7mo ago
  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).
• fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
  This feels like ragebait (rage bait?) for people that enjoy language and words. The leading example is nonsense.
• michaeld123 7mo ago
  I'm the author. Updated the article based on this thread — thanks to everyone who pushed back. Changes: reframed "boiling water" as deliberately on-the-fence rather than asserting it's a word; added a note that the obscure end of the slider is noise; acknowledged collocations as the established term; added a German/Dutch/Norwegian section on how other languages handle the space problem; softened "wasn't possible before LLMs" to "wasn't practical"; and threaded the concept of "loaded" throughout as the key distinction. Many of the specific examples came directly from commenters here — credited below.
  • s1mon 7mo ago
    I'd really love to see the prompt(s) you used with Claude. The way the article was written I mistakenly thought you would expand upon that in a footnote or sidebar.
    • michaeld123 7mo ago
      It's not so much the prompt, as the volume. This overall project has involved >100M LLM inferences, spread across 1.9M headwords. the building block is "what words or short terms are related to X?", but scaled out. Plus a lot of filtering. So it's mostly a reflection of English, and also a reflection of what ChatGPT and Claude report back as a significant collocation.
• urbandw311er 7mo ago
  The author of this article just hasn’t been taught how to use a dictionary. The words aren’t “missing”, they’re just indexed under one of their parts. For example “wait upon” would be located within the entry for “wait”.
• beeforpork 7mo ago
  > But roughly 15% are plausible: “wooden chair,” “morning coffee.” That’s still 30 billion sensible pairs. (1) Who counted those? Whence those numbers? (2) The examples are normal two-word phrases with one word modifying the other, often categorised as an adjective. The examples are counter-examples to the very claim made in that article. (3) Using Clause to brainstorm s.t. is a weird thing to say... (4) I would say the use of 'lexicalized' is wrong or at least uncommon. It usually refers to specialised semantics of something that could be interpreted generically, too. Like 'sleeping bag'. Or indeed 'cold feet'. Lexicalisation may involve deleting spaces, like 'hotdog'. And I am pretty sure lexicalised phrasal words are usually intensionally listed in dictionaries. And so 'ice' is not lexicalised 'frozen water', but it is not overtly a phrase but is a separate atomic word. => I don't get the point.
  • michaeld123 7mo ago
    My bad. there's a little sidebar about it, but I put it lower after the chart because there wasn't room. You might still not find my logic on the 15% satisfying, but it's there.
• DaedalusII 7mo ago
  in German, they just remove the spaces and keep the word, and this problem is solved: Entschädigungsleistungen - compensation benefits Wiederbeschaffungskosten - replacement value Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung - motor vehicle liability insurance Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän - Danube steamboat captain Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz - beef labeling regulation law
  • Retr0id 7mo ago
    How often do these compound words get listed in German dictionaries?
• wlesieutre 7mo ago
  There are an infinite number of describable concepts that don't get a specific word. That doesn't mean the whole description is a "word with spaces." It's just part of how language works that when there isn't a single word carrying the meaning you want, you put multiple words together and they can mean the thing together. Even though there isn't a specific word for that, I wouldn't say "It's just part of how language works that when there isn't a single word carrying the meaning you want, you put multiple words together and they can mean the thing together" actually is one big word with spaces in it. It's a bunch of words together that carry a more specific meaning when put together in that order.
• languagehacker 7mo ago
  I'd point folks to the concept of "Construction Grammar", which is related to this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar
• yifanl 7mo ago
  Off the top of my head, peanut butter, black hole, and amusement park are concepts that can't be easily intuited by just combining the two singular terms, but I also wouldn't consider them as phrases.
  • eszed 7mo ago
    "Peanut butter" would be dealt with by including a reference under the "butter" entry. Something like: 'N, culinary. A paste made of ground up nuts, sometimes with additional oils and other ingredients. E.g. "peanut butter", "almond butter".' "Amusement park", same. Falls very much under the "place of recreation" definition of "park". "Black hole" is maybe a bit different, because it's a scientific term - and certainly in a science dictionary would be included as a two-word item - but, for consistency, in a regular dictionary should be handled identically to the above, with a note on the word "hole". While including noun phrases as singular entities in a word game is entirely appropriate, I don't think the OP has formed a rigorous definition of the concept that they are trying to describe. I agree with the other comment which suggests that they need some instruction / practice using a dictionary.
    • boxed 7mo ago
      The word splitting in English is an accident of history, not a linguistic reality though. This is hilariously obvious to Swedish speakers :P
      • eszed 7mo ago
        Well, it's a linguistic reality - all of which are accidents of history - which absolutely isn't to say it reflects anything definitive about reality reality. My point is that English has a straightforward way of dealing with this (admittedly arbitrary) case, which OP either ignores or doesn't understand, and instead adds unnecessary categorical complication.
        • boxed 7mo ago
          It's not a linguistic reality in spoken English is what I meant. We Swedish speakers can hear it when English speakers pronounce the space and when they don't, because we're super sensitive to that difference because our language cares. We can easily flip from one state to the other and repeat the word/words back and English speakers will instantly hear that it sounds weird and wrong but often they don't understand why. English spelling does NOT line up with pronounced English when it comes to what we in Swedish calls "särskrivning" which is a word that roughly means "separateness writing".
• Dwedit 7mo ago
  Is nobody going to mention that "taco [N WORD]" is one of the words there? (Third page from the end)
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
    • ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
      You should implement an option (e.g. [checkbox] "Urban Dictionary Entries") that doesn't censor these words. Understandable that the default criteria doesn't include this, but language construction shouldn't be removed of offendables). Just as an example: some people find the word "jerry-rigged" to be racist, as it previously replaced "nig___-rigged". Same with "rule of thumb" (due to origins in caning people). There could be no Huckleberry Finn written in a world without pottylanguage. Who defines the boundaries of acceptable language? I'm not advocating for ebonics classes, but a language's entire purpose is to be useful, to convey information (including hatred).
  • eszed 7mo ago
    Oh, geeze. The progressive transparency effect on the words towards the "obscure" end of their spectrum made the later pages impossible for me to read. I suspect the entire list was produced by an AI entity which had not been prompted to avoid giving offense. I predict a range of (tedious) opinions about whether a prohibition on that particular word is an appropriate inclusion in a system prompt. That's also not a term I've - thankfully! - ever heard, so I've no idea if it's hallucinated. This is not an invitation, HN, to define or explain it to me.
• ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
  I'm currently reading Cormack McCarthy's Suttree (my first of his novels) — just an exceptional polymath capable of painting complicated scenery with words dozenly scattered throughout paragraphs [0]. My favorite adjective he's coördinated is "burntwing", used to describe moths spiraling downwards after passing through candleflames. If I had crafted such a descriptive contraction, my former styling would've been "burnt-wing", had I even been capable of generating such concise imagery [1]. McCarthy's stylings have helped me to reduce hyphenations in my own writings — reducing their usage mainly to contractedwords which might be all-too-confusing without them. [0] pg104 has ten words that I do not know their definitions, yet through context they work to advance the storyline of character racists (book is set in 1950s). [1] decades ago, during college burnout, I was searching for the essense of "burntwing" — reduced to writing a professor about "feeling like a burning airplane in tailspin." My trajectory back then was definitely burntwing.
  • ilamont 7mo ago
    Wait til you read Blood Meridian. The imagery he created with words, some of them his own creations, is just ... beyond compare. I'm reading The Road now, which comes from the same place. I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully. Another contemporary writer who worked with new words in a very creative way was Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun. Some were inventions using Greek, French, or Latin roots. Others were forgotten terms which he resurrected. Someone compiled a dictionary, Lexicon Urthus, which discusses the origins of certain terms and their placement within the series.
    • ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
      >I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully. Absolutely. Similarly, I read the Tao Te Ching 4x annually, by reading the same single passage both before and after bed, daily. Both Laotzi's and McCarthy's density of construction is just soooooo human condition. [Suttree book world] Harrington just found the eyeball in the junkyard vehicle — in a single paragraph humanity just oozes, including his toying with viscosity and shock, and re-toying again. Washes hands. The drunk boss having previously joked "yeah the driver only scraped his shinbones." I am hooked. McCarthy's books jumped to the top of my bookqueue after reading a HN article a few months ago about his library/collections being catalogued, post-humously. ---- I've just read Dave Wallace's three major novels (Jest & King & Broom, ~2000 pages) and McCarthy is absolutely the better author, not requiring hundreds of footnotes to say less with more esoteric bullshit [0]. DFW just seems like a bully to me ("wow I'm so smart"—DFW, probably), and honestly his samizdat is about 800 pages too long (myself a former bored addict prodigy with poor family comms) [1]. Mostly I read DFW because he's my judge-brother's favorite fiction author — it felt like a challenging obligation/chore, much like our personal relationship. With both, I've felt mostly emptiness. For powerful shortform pieces, both are quite capable of emotional stirring (This is Water). I laugh when I see this book on others' shelves, because they probably haven't read it and it isn't really worth the time to read [all of] it. A few simple questions of the "reader" verifies this. My own bullying is that "I have" [snooty], however much I wish for all that reading time back. Bullies making bullies =D ---- By page 100 of Suttree you are hooked. By page 100 of Jest you are bored [2]. I've yet to read more than six pages of McCarthy in one day. For Wallace my eyes would constantly glaze over dozens of pages and just think: what happened here?! why did author include [all of] this!? Although I am tired after reading either author for twenty minutes, McCarthy's doesn't feel like the author is just wasting my time. ---- My McCarthy readlist is structured so: Suttree (current); Blood Meridian; The Road — is this advisable? ---- [0] DFW's footnotes == even more of his esoteric bullshit [1] If you do read Infinite Jest, absolutely use a study guide(s) (specifically Aaron Swartz's incredible breakdown... which can reduce the book just just a few hundred pages). If you've ever suffered an addiction (whether yourself or crazybestfriends's), you probably don't need to suffer through any longform DFWallace. [2] I understand this is part of DFW's "style" : the frenzied passages of speed addicts, thirty pages into killing a dog (e.g.) when three pages would have done better, more respectful of reader's time (addict or not).
• bbstats 7mo ago
  these are called phrases
• less_less 7mo ago
  In addition to what others have pointed out, many of these aren't actually missing from traditional dictionaries: they're just inflected differently. So your example lists phrases like "operating systems", "immune systems" and "solar systems" as missing from traditional dictionaries, but at least the online OED and M-W have "operating system", "immune system" and "solar system" in them. It's just that your script is apparently listing the plural as a separate phrase. On languages other than English: in general, different languages do word division very differently. At least in German and Dutch, many of those phrasal verbs are separable, meaning that they are one word in the infinitive but are multiple words in the present tense. So for example, where in English you would say "I log in to the website", in Dutch it would be "Ik log in op de website". "Log in" is two words in both cases, but in Dutch it's the separated form of the single-word separable verb inloggen ("I must log in now" = "Ik moet nu inloggen"). The verb is indeed separable in that the two words often don't end up next to each other: "I log in quickly" = "Ik log snel in". Dutch, like German, has lots of compounds. But there are also agglutinative languages, which have even more complex compound words, perhaps comprising a whole sentence in another language. Eg (from Wikipedia) Turkish "evlerinizdenmiş" = "(he/she/it) was (apparently/said to be) from your houses" or Plains Cree "paehtāwāēwesew" = "he is heard by higher powers"; and these aren't corner cases, that's how the language works.
• robertclaus 7mo ago
  Isn't this the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopedia?
  • tolerance 7mo ago
    I was afraid that no one would bring this up. I’m developing a strange relationship with Wikipedia over the commonplace role it serves as an online resource. But I appreciate how it normalized the practice of looking things up and to get a general overview of a thing, leading to internal and external references. Credit is due to search engines also in this case I reckon.
• WorldMaker 7mo ago
  One of the axes this analysis seems to be missing is the subtle spectrum from "multi-word expressions" to "idioms". Traditional lexicographers have long published separate idioms books, such as the Merriam-Webster New World American Idioms Handbook and the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms. Wiktionary doesn't need to make that distinction between MWEs and Idioms and tends to conflate MWEs and Idioms as there is no separate "Wikidiom". Arguably, that multi-book confusion runs deep on the internet because Urban Dictionary should probably be fully titled the Urban Dictionary of Idioms and Slang. It's not just page limits but also categorical limits and classic lexicographers would build multiple books/volumes, not just settle on one "dictionary". Classic scholars would often have a "reference shelf" with multiple dictionaries, books of idioms, thesauri, and more. The CD-ROM and then the internet has kind of tunnel visioned that this entire shelf can be merely "one app".
• waffletower 7mo ago
  Dictionaries containing spaced compounds were not scalable with print media. The printed OED was encyclopedic in scale. Compound dictionaries are more than feasible now. Arguing whether a collection of commonly used words are expressions or concepts or even single "spaced words" is beside the point. Simply identify these differences and classify them in the compendium.
• ragall 7mo ago
  It appears to me that the author is trying too hard to make a point: "merry-go-round" is a single compound word that several dictionaries contain; "canned goods" is not commonly used[1] (more of a bureaucratic jargon), and people would just say "cans"(US) or "preserves" (UK); "household chores" is simply "chores", as the word is no longer commonly used outside the house context; "coffee break ritual" is not a concept in English-speaking countries so it would make no sense to have it in a dictionary, and so many of the examples are exactly that. [1] I wonder how many here have ever been told something like "Prithee, husband, bring back a dozen canned goods from the market, for in the meanwhile I shall do my household chores".
  • inkcapmushroom 7mo ago
    I have definitely used canned goods and household chores in sentences before.
  • 9rx 7mo ago
    I didn't take that the author was trying to make a point, rather pondering about when a word becomes worthy of inclusion in the dictionary. "Boiling water" is a word that hasn't (yet) been deemed worthy. On the other hand, "hot water" is a word that is included in the dictionary, just as "still water", "warm water", etc. are. Somewhere between those included and "boiling water" is line where a word becomes worthy of inclusion. But where, exactly, is that line?
• dirtikiti 7mo ago
  No. This article shows a distinct lack of understanding of the basic building blocks of the English language. "Words" don't have "spaces." Phrases are made of words separated by spaces. "Boiling Water" is not a word. "Water" is a word. A noun, the subject. "Boiling" is a word. An adjective, in this case. Which modifies the subject. I don't know if you're trying to be clever, but you're not.
  • OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
    English has words with spaces. Boiling water isn't one of them, but in general, if you can't insert another adjective between an adjective-noun pair, it's linguistically a compound word that we happen to write with a space. "Fast food" is a good example. It's not simply an adjective-noun pair, as demonstrated by the fact that you sound like a crazy person if you try to insert literally anything between "fast" and "food" in "I eat too much fast food". The "fast food" can be modified all you like, as in "I eat too much lukewarm fast food", "I eat too much depressing fast food", but you can't treat "fast" as merely an adjective of "food", else "I eat too much fast, filling food" wouldn't strip the sentence of the implication I eat at McDonalds or whatever.
    • dirtikiti 7mo ago
      Except fast is an adjective when describing food... Just because the phrase is used colloquially to describe a specific group of restaurants doesn't change the fact the phrase "fast food" is comprised of two words, one being a noun; the other an adjective. Fast greasy food. Fast disgusting food. Fast food is not a word. It is a phrase. Words don't have spaces.
• NoPicklez 7mo ago
  I'm not a linguist, but I don't know why you would need a dictionary that includes words with spaces. It's pretty obvious "boiling water" shouldn't be in the dictionary to be begin with but "boiling" and "water" should be. Unless I'm just not understanding it
• wanda 7mo ago
  They should probably look up the definition of dictionary in their dictionary.