Wiktionary:Information desk/2023/February

What are good websites to use to search for quotations/citations/attestations of words in Modern English?
I already know about Archive.org's text contents search, Google Books/Scholar/Groups, and Hansard. I'd like to know what others exist. – Vuccala ✿  16:09, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Early English Books Online for early modern material (ideally the Proquest service if you have access to it, but the free University of Michigan transcription database is fine for finding citations). Google News for newspapers. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 17:01, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

https://gutensearch.com lets you search across Project Gutenberg texts in various languages. Not exactly modern material, but modern English. Jberkel 17:02, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

For contemporary English, The Corpus of Contemporary American English may be helpful. You have to sign up, but low volume queries are free of charge. EdH (talk) 18:25, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

For older newspapers, Trove (Australian), Chronicling America, and Elephind. There are others too, but these are the ones I've used most frequently due to their breadth of coverage and openness.

For contemporary magazines, Issuu. 70.172.194.25 23:39, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks everyone, these are great!– Vuccala ✿  14:17, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

I accidentally made a spelling error when creating the page, it should be: اسلامی جمہوریہ پاکستان SAA2002 (talk) 04:41, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

I moved it for you. For future reference: you could have moved it yourself, though it would have left a redirect that an admin like me would have had to delete for you. There's something at the top of the screen when you're viewing the page that says "More". When you click on that it gives you the option to "Move". Chuck Entz (talk) 06:39, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Appearing in the 1918 film The Birth of a Race at 44:55. Online OCR isn't working and I can't find any transcription of this text online that commonly appears on tablets like the one drawn here. @Lambiam? PseudoSkull (talk) 17:54, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

See the blue box at he:עשרת הדיברות.  --Lambiam 21:03, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

@Lambiam: What's the mark above the he and yod, final characters of the first two commandments? Is it geresh/gershayim? The mark over the he is also visible in this image. I'm only familiar with Tiberian vocalization marks and am curious. 70.172.194.25 21:10, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure. The final he of the first line stands for a long noun phrase that begins with the tetragrammaton. In many versions we see a he followed by a single geresh, in others (e.g. here and here) we find instead a pair of yods. Are these meant to serve as stand-alone gershayim? Their shapes are definitely that of a yod. Perhaps the use in the film image of a he with two tittles over it (also seen in this painting) to symbolize the long phrase is particular to this specific text. The ending of the second line is unlike any other I've seen; a plain yod-he-yod-he is standard.  --Lambiam 23:55, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

More examples of he with two marks above: 1, 2, both from France. This one has the tittles squeezed together, and also numbers the commandments (but it looks like either dalet got repeated in the numbering, or part of the numeral-he fell off). Also, the yoh-he-yod-he has a similar mark above one of the he’s, instead of the yod.

Examples of yod-he-yod: 1, 2, 3, 4, but none that I have seen have the same mark above the yod as in Birth of a Race.

There many other variants too, but I was mainly focusing on these ones. 70.172.194.25 01:13, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

The dots are just an abbreviation mark. There are a huge variety of traditional methods of indicating abbreviations in Hebrew—the Encyclopaedia Judaica has an entire article on it, which also notes that there are perhaps over 80 different ways of representing the Tetragrammaton. The use of a single geresh for an abbreviated word and double gershayim for a phrase is just the modern convention. There are also, it seems, (different) abbreviation marks in your examples 2 and 3 of the yod-he-yod representation. The double yod is another, separate option for representing the Tetragrammaton. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:49, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

"The dots are just an abbreviation mark" Do they have a Unicode encoding by any chance?

Thanks for the reference, I'll have to check it out. Maybe some of these are worth adding as entries. Could you provide the volume and page reference, or even just entry title, within EJ? 70.172.194.25 22:45, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

The entry is, IIRC, "Abbreviations" in vol. 1. I doubt they have any specific Unicode encoding, in transcribing it would probably make most sense to use double gershayim which have the same role. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 00:20, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

I've noticed a lot of definitions contain the word "systematic". When creating a definition, does "systematic" tend to improve the clarity of the definition, or is it 'buzzwordy' and should be avoided?
As an example, here's the first 5 definitions that use it when searching "the systematic":

• apologetics: "The field of study concerned with the systematic defense of a position, or of religious or occult doctrines"
• nosology: "The study of diseases; the systematic investigation or classification of disease."
• systems theory: "The systematic study of the complex interactions in systems."
• ethanoic acid: "The systematic alternative name for acetic acid."
• dogmatics: "The systematic study of dogmata."

When should it be used, if at all? – Vuccala ✿  19:08, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

It should definitely be used for systematic names of chemical substances such as ethanoic acid. The other examples you provided are more debatable, and I'll leave that for others to answer. 70.172.194.25 08:36, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't think any of the examples here are objectionable. A bigger issue is that the entry at systematic is quite poor at the moment IMO (e.g. the chemistry sense is missing completely). "Systematic study" in general has a specific meaning, as the OED explains—"of a subject or study: presented, formulated, or pursued as a system or coherent body of ideas or principles"—which I think certainly applies to systems theory and to dogmatics, and adds some precision beyond just "study". —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 10:34, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

While creating the lemma مَسِیت (masīt) for the Saraiki language, I noticed there is whitespace, but I'm not sure how to get rid of it. I can't find anything wrong with the template so I'm assuming it's to do with the module perhaps? نعم البدل (talk) 20:11, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Has this been fixed? I tried viewing the page in multiple browsers and it's not obvious to me what the concern is. If the problem persists, could you be more specific about where you are seeing too much whitespace? 70.172.194.25 08:39, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes it's been fixed! Thanks to Fenekhay! نعم البدل (talk) 02:35, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone know how to replace all these nasty links with transclusions on confingere? Not sure what happened here, syntax appears correct. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:03, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

It appears to come from {{it-conj}}. I discovered vandals had added content to what was supposed to be a redlinked tracking template. It's now been deleted, so check to see whether that was the cause. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:07, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:43, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

When a Wiktionary page is opened in Mobile View, for a brief moment all the languages are collapsed, but then the page finishes loading and all the languages expand, making it hard to find the language/definition I'm looking for when the page has dozens of languages. Is there a way I can make Wiktionary behave more like Wikipedia mobile view, by having all the sections (languages) collapsed except the topmost one? Or better yet, being able to set which languages I use (English, Polish, Latin) and having the rest automatically collapse? – Vuccala ✿  00:50, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

I was going to write some hacky code to work around the issue (probably involving $("h2").click();), but honestly, I'm not sure why there would be a difference between Wikipedia and Wiktionary in this regard in the first place. That suggests there might be a better solution. Perhaps you may want to submit this to Phabricator? I agree collapsing seems like a good default for usability on mobile, at least on entries with multiple language sections. 70.172.194.25 05:14, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

They know: , . They just don't care. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 07:31, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

So the reason for the difference between Wikipedia and Wiktionary is given here:

Add $wgMFCollapseSectionsByDefault config var to allow disabling auto section collapse

The section collapse model doesn't work very well on sites like Wiktionary, where there usually is little or no content in section 0 and the rest of the top-level sections are languages. Setting allows it to be disabled for that site only, leaving sections open and readable.

I think the correct approach would have been to expand sections by default if there is only one language section (or maybe some other threshold), and to collapse them otherwise. 70.172.194.25 18:39, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

That is the correct approach, but they will never implement it, because then they'd have to admit they actually care about Wiktionary. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 23:43, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

70.172.194.25 has written a userspace Javascript snippet over on Grease Pit that accomplishes what I was trying to do. Thank you! – Vuccala ✿  21:08, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

How do I wildcard with certain letters filled in? I need 7 letter words from a group on a puzzle. 45.24.238.128 15:51, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Wiktionary might not be the best solution for this, but it's hypothetically possible to encode such a pattern as a regex title search, e.g. here's A _ _ _ _ _ R: (takes a while to load). You might also want to search incategory:"English non-lemma forms" if you want to include plurals, verb past tense forms, etc. If you want to include all languages, then remove the category rule entirely. That said, I tried a few searches of this form and all timed out, some with no results provided, so it doesn't seem very reliable.

Alternatives might include grepping a dictionary text file (these can easily be found online and may even come bundled with your operating system). If you specifically want to use Wiktionary's word list, then grepping a list of titles extracted from a database dump/API call, or using Quarry, may be more reliable, but they require more technical knowledge. There may be a specific user-friendly tool on Toolforge for doing searches of this form, but I can't find it. 70.172.194.25 07:44, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Etymology : Basque : bolu = mill

        arte = between

= between the mills 109.238.140.21 19:45, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

 Added to the etymology under Boluarte#Spanish. Thank you! 70.172.194.25 20:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I created the entry ⿳宀珤⿺辶⿲隹貝招, which is the ligature of 招財進寶. But there is actually no simplified form of this ligature because this is a calligraphic form (calligraphy is still done in traditional Chinese in mainland China). So how can I suppress the simplified form in the template in the entry 招財進寶? Mahogany115 (talk) 05:57, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

One of the recurrent segments of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is named “That's Yeet. Dabbing on Fleek, Fam!”. Which sense of dabbing is implied here?  --Lambiam 20:01, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

The dance move (ety 1 sense 5) I would assume. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 20:13, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

The dance/gesture, as Muqanna noted. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:41, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks.  --Lambiam 18:17, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

We now have over a dozen writing systems being documented for Pali, at which point some of the material that is wanted even for stripped down pages needs to be held centrally. As <dogma>typical editors can't edit modules</dogma>, I'm proposing to use templates for master copies of the hard to predict spellings (started) and irregular inflections (module support in preparation). Is there any easy way to share a documentation file with parameterisation, e.g. by the Latin script form of the term. One method of sharing is to provide templates for the documentation file, but that still leads to the tedium of creating both template and documentation file for each Latin script term with these complexities. One mechanism would be to clone {{documentation}} itself, but cloning is a good way of propagating errors and entrenching obsolescence.--RichardW57m (talk) 14:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Example: {{pi-alt-veditabbo}} RichardW57m (talk) 14:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I made a page for the word "uiscedhath", but the declension table I'm using:

isn't displaying some qualities right for the plurals: the nom. pl. and d. pl. should be "na huiscedathanna" and the g. pl. "na n-uiscedathanna", but the h- and n- aren't showing up. I can't really tell why that is; on the page for uisce it displays the initial mutations fine, and I can't see any difference that might cause that between the two templates. I would edit it ofc but I can't edit declension tables. Why is this? FlailingMadness (talk) 01:52, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@FlailingMadness: The template you're using is {{ga-decl-m3}}. The nom. pl. with the definite article form is "na {{{1}}}{{{3}}}", and these parameters are "uiscedh" (1) "athanna" (3), so it becomes "na uiscedhathanna" ("na " + "uiscedh"+"athanna").

Either the template is incorrect (I doubt because it's heavily used) or you need a different template. Is there a word with an exactly same declension, which has a table here? I don't know how Irish works, just explaining what's happening. Here's a full list of Irish declension templates: Category:Irish_noun_inflection-table_templates. You should have posted this question on Wiktionary:Grease pit. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:41, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

There are words with the same declension, e.g. "dath" (third declension, masculine); uiscedhath ends with "dath" so they're the same declension. For another example, which starts with a vowel, I found "ur"—as is to be expected, the mutations show: "na hura" for the nom. pl., "na n-ur" for the g. pl., and "an t-ur" for the nom. sg., another missing initial I forgot about. All the mutations show up properly for "dath" too (different mutations for consonant-initial words, however). This is more confusing because these affixes should always be there—it's not a declension thing, it's a grammatical thing (masculine singular nouns get a t- prefix in the nom., plural nouns are eclipsed in the gen. , when neither occurs and the proclitic word ends with a vowel sound and the next word starts with one, there is a h-). So really it should apply to all words no matter what—but it's not working here. If I've typed something wrong, I don't understand what.

I'll put similar questions there in the future, thanks. FlailingMadness (talk) 19:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

how can you make the reference appear when you hover the mouse on the number (like on wikipedia)? so that you don't have to click on them every time LICA98 (talk) 14:27, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

It requires some admin to install the Reference Tooltips gadget on this wiki. See also Wiktionary:Information desk/2019/April#Reference Tooltips.  --Lambiam 20:40, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

You can use popups, which I've been doing for so many years that i've lost track. It does the same thing, and also makes all other links hoverable, ... for me and for many other people, this is great. But if you want the one without the other, you might need to use some custom Javascript code. —Soap— 17:49, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Is it a valid word? TrangaBellam (talk) 10:31, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but seems to be Indian English. Equinox ◑ 13:44, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Isn't arsoning the present participle (and gerund) of the verb to arson, which appears to be used more widely than the subcontinent.  --Lambiam 20:25, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

My Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (大漢和辞典) arrived today. It defines most of the Unicode Hanzi (China only though, no Chu Nom or kokuji), many of which we don't yet have defined here. Since the dictionary and many of its definitions aren't readily available online, I'd like to let people know that they can message me for any information they want from it. Is this possible, and how would I go about it? Are there any Userboxes or groups for such things? Signbear999 (talk) 02:17, 28 February 2023 (UTC)