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User talk:Squidonius/English words with uncommon properties

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English words with uncommon properties needs top-down fixing. A question to address is “what should the article deal with?”.

Some thoughts

[edit]

The current title is problematic.

Firstly, "uncommon" is subjective, unless defined. No central reference is provided (i.e. uncommon according to John Doe). A statistical definition of " uncommon" is also not possible here: while several properties analysed are outliers, others are not.

Secondly, from my understanding of things, the noun “property” has a technical meaning in linguistics, but can be used in the common sense. For example, nouns can have four properties (person, number, gender and case). Conversely, the word “characteristics” does not have any technical meanings.

This article should not be a medley of peculiar words (i.e. "word trivia"). So what should it be?

It contains many different forms of peculiar words, many of these forms have their own pages. The quantity of links to and from and the ease required to find the article explains why it had over 1,000 viewers per day: it was acting like a hub linking the various pages together. In fact several of which are poorly linked without it and navigation is not straight forward.

One option could be to make independent the sections without their own articles and recreate the whole article as navbox or infobox, possibly with a short article about "English words with uncommon properties" (with a better name).


The article partially overlaps with “logology” (recreational linguistics), i.e. games with letter patterns, such as isograms and palindromes, but certain topics do not fall under it, I think, such as the discussion on the longest word in English.


The most commonly cited references are:

  1. Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities
  2. Making the Alphabet Dance
  3. Word Nerd: More Than 17,000 Fascinating Facts about Words
  4. Word ways
  5. FAQ of Oxford dictionary (http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/asktheexperts/frequently-asked-questions and some OED about pages)
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