Historical look back at old articles on this popular word game.
February 15, 2022 - bigthink.com
Long before the Wordle mania, there was the crossword puzzle craze. And newspapers around the world condemned them as an “invasive weed” that caused mental illnesses and even murder.
Readit Newsmichaeld123 commented on The New York Times hated crossword puzzles before it embraced them bigthink.com/pessimists-a... · Posted by u/michaeld123
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/michaeld123 commented on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries linguabase.org/words-with... · Posted by u/gligierko
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?
Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
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michaeld123 commented on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries linguabase.org/words-with... · Posted by u/gligierko
[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you]
Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.
E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.
In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.
Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.
I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".
And I attempted to add your 'svart hull' note.
michaeld123 commented on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries linguabase.org/words-with... · Posted by u/gligierko
The issue with German as well as Norwegian is that a space creates a semantically distinct structure, so it's not that they remove the space, but that one wasn't there in the first place, and some of those compounds then become important enough for the dictionary.
Absolutely not all - there's a near unbounded set of possible compounds.
In Norwegian, we in fact have a compound for the incorrect separation of compounds: "orddelingsfeil" (word separation error). Actually, we have two - technically it's "særskrivingsfeil" (separate writing error), but "orddelingsfeil" is more common... We take this seriously.
The problem is that while some are definitely wrong, others change meaning.
E.g. "en norsk lærer" means "a Norwegian teacher" but "en norsklærer" means "a teacher of the subject Norwegian". There's an infinite set of possible -lærer compounds: If you create a new subject then a teacher of that subject is a <subject>lærer. Obviously they can't all go in the dictionary.
Some other examples:
"Røyk fritt" means "smoke freely" while "røykfritt" means "smokefree". "Steke ovn", means "to fry an oven", while "stekeovn" means "oven". These two belong in the dictionary because they are so common and that though technically you can use "ovn" and "fri"/"fritt" to form a near infinite number of other common forms as well, in practice the number of common forms that use them is quite limited.
The key part is that most compounds in languages like German or Norwegian will only have one valid way of writing them. Add spaces, and you usually end up with something ungrammatical or with an entirely different meaning.
Whereas in English whether or not a word can be written with a space, with a hyphen, or combined much more often changes over time, and can differ in different places at different times, as the <separate words> -> <hyphenated> -> <compound> pipeline in English is slow and arbitrary and not necessarily reflecting a change in meaning.
I just adapted your comments into the paragraph starting with "German". Hopefully accurately.
michaeld123 commented on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries linguabase.org/words-with... · Posted by u/gligierko
> 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.
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.
michaeld123 commented on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries linguabase.org/words-with... · Posted by u/gligierko
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.
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.
michaeld123 commented on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries linguabase.org/words-with... · Posted by u/gligierko
If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.
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