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.
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.
It's quite interesting that "boiling water" in many Slavic languages is actually a separate word (and not derived from "water", but from "boiling"; similar how the author mentions "ice" being used instead of "frozen water").
It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.
in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?
We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.
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.
but what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils.
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 mean it’s interesting that this is generally the case with many (or even most) words across languages… But I’d wager it’s more the norm than the exception, so I don’t know if “boiling water” is that interesting of an example.
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.
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 and would fail the substitution test.
Cool, going back over them I'm actually surprised at the strength of the substitution test, thus far I haven't really encountered one that strongly goes against the test if a suitable synonym is picked.
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.
Yeah, the good examples are usually in dictionaries as headwords, the moderate examples are usually in dictionaries as phrases within the entry for one (or more) of the words that comprise them, leaving fairly weak examples actually “missing” if you want to use “missing words with spaces” as the basis for content.
All words in a thesaurus would generally also be in a dictionary? The difference between a thesaurus and a dictionary is what each tells you about a word.
In the US, if you ordered a hot dog and got a sausage (or vice versa), it would be very reasonable to return the item and ask for something else. They are culturally completely different, the same way Cheerios in milk is not another cold soup like gazpacho is.
The first two I kind of understand what the author means. But "help me" and "severe pain" made me think that I'm just not the right public for this text.
A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hospital bills feels like a pretty ordinary compound to me - not like "good morning" or "ginger ale" where you can't just use what you know about the two words to figure out what the compound must mean.
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
I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.
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.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between this compound word concept and idioms. Both are largely atomic, defy analysis via individual word definition, and fairly language (and culture or dialect) specific.
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 think it's more than overlap -- they are the same thing.
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.
Sure, but my main intent was to raise the question as to why it was singled out in the article/blog post as something that needs to be in the dictionary.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
In Dutch we indeed happily do this even for English loanwords like "creditcard" or something more obscure like "lockpick". When in doubt, remove the space.
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?
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.)
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.
A mixture of melting ice and water suitable for drinking has a word: ice water. It's not a adjective noun phrase. It has a more specific meaning than just the two words together. You can order an ice water at a restaurant
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).
"Steam" is very definitely the gas phase of water. Water vapor is too. If we are talking about chemistry they are essentially synonyms.
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.
"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.
> You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants
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.)
Nope, water vapour is the gas phase of water mixed with other gases while steam is just the gas phase of water. Water vapour can condense into tiny droplets which can freeze into ice crystals, both of which are visible as 'clouds'. Steam is not visible until it condenses into droplets at which point it no longer is steam but water suspended in another medium, usually air.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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
[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/goodnight_n
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?
> 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 an 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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