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.
I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.
in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Every word in a thesaurus belongs in a dictionary.
i guess Saturday night could have some extra details explaining the context around our standard work week. But even that is a stretch.
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.
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.
Roovleisslaghuisinspekteur =
Rooi = red
Vleis = meat
Slag = butcher
Huis = house
Inspekteur = inspector
"Inspector who controls the quality of red meat in butcheries"
I think maybe the word the author is looking for is 'phrase'
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.
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.
English: cream of mushroom soup
Spanisch: sopa cremosa de champiñones
German: Champignoncremesuppe
Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"
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.
It has some compound words. But including too many of them would quickly get out of hand
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
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
Maybe you don't have "hospital bills". I don't have "landscaping bills", but I know exactly what they are.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> Got a word Didn’t
> frozen water → ice boiling water
ice - water - steam
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> “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?”
"Eachother" feels as natural as "somebody", "nobody", "anybody" to me