Language desk
< May 13	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	May 15 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 14

Official English Name for Japanese Organisation

Resolved

経営科学系研究部会連合協議会

Would this be the Council for Scientific and Economic Research? Google doesn't seem to know anything about them, so I am guessing this is not the official English name. Does anyone know? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 02:30, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

技術開発本部 of NTT DATA was in it. Ask at here. Oda Mari (talk) 09:14, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

経営科学系研究部会連合協議会 appears to be a Japanese organization consisting of 7 member organizations, which are mostly research groups within academic organizations. (See parenthetical explanations of the organization in [1] and [2]). 経営科学 seems to be the Japanese word for management science. I doubt "Council for Scientific and Economic Research" is the official English name of the organization. --173.49.9.195 (talk) 09:41, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, right, thanks, both of you. No apparent official name, then? Ah well. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 22:27, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

[EDIT] - Thanks, Mari - I contacted NTT Data, and they told me the English name is JASMAC, or Joint Association Study Group of Management Science. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 02:05, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Whence vs. from whence

Ever since a friend pointed out an "improper" use of "from whence" in a sentence where "whence" by itself would do, I've noticed the use of "from whence" whenever I see it. Looking in the OED just now I see many many quotations using either form, and wonder whether there is a pattern to when "from whence" (or "of whence") is better than "whence". Some examples: Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, "Of whence, I pray? Tra. Of Pisa, sir." But also Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, "Let him walke from whence he came." Dryden's translation of Virgil's Æneis, "Resolve me, Strangers, whence, and what you are." But also from Dryden's same translation, "From whence these Murmurs, and this change of Mind‥?" Other examples include C. Brontë, Shirley, "The laughter and mirth of her uncle and Hannah and Mary, she could not tell whence originating." Dickens, Oliver Twist, "The little room‥looked into a garden, whence a wicket-gate opened into a small paddock." Dickens, Bleak House, "From whence have we derived that spiritual profit?" Is there any rhyme or reason to "from whence" vs. "whence"? Is "whence" by itself considered more "proper", unless the context requires a "from" or "of"? Pfly (talk) 03:46, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fowler has a bit of a diatribe about the use of whence and whither vs. where from and where to. Much of it is diffuse and very much contrary to the spirit of the "plain speech" he advocates. But at the end, he comes right out and says it clearly: .. occasions arise now and then ... to which whence and whither are ... more appropriate than any equivalent. They should be allowed to stand on their own feet; not even the examples that can be found in the Psalms and elsewhere justify the use today of the tautology "from whence". -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 04:03, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you can hardly go wrong with just plain whence unless you're Bob Dylan, who used "you better go back to from where you came" in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". Deor (talk) 04:18, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, and I see now that even the quotes above that seemed to require a "from" or "to" don't really. This originally came up after watching the Fellowship of the Ring movie, in which Elrond says "The ring must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came." Afterward my friend commented on this, claiming that Tolkien would never have written such a thing (I had never considered it before) And, googling "lord of the rings" "from whence" just now, I see there are many web pages out there making this exact point. Perhaps saying "from whence you came" is like saying "to whither you go"... Dylan's "to from where" is great. Reminds me of Pogo. Pfly (talk) 05:47, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, "from whence" is used no less than 27 times in the King James bible (compared with 45 uses of "whence" without "from"), but the tautology, probably used there for emphasis, is best avoided in modern English (if you use "whence" at all) unless you are deliberately aiming to sound archaic. Dbfirs 06:47, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"From whence" has a long precedent. It's likely to be a remnant of the middle english case system. It's only been criticised as "redundant" or "tautology" recently by literary critics (who are mostly NOT linguists) who probably still use perfectly modern tautologies such as "boxing ring", "Guinea pig" or for a closer to home example, "for free". Personally I feel that if you just have "whence" on its own without "from" it looks more archaic and overly formal. 94.112.33.204 (talk) 22:36, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

... and if you don't want to sound archaic and formal at all, just use "from where" and avoid "whence" completely. Dbfirs 06:57, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I used to wince at "from whence" until I realized how old its usage is. A quick search of the 1611 Authorised King James Version of the Bible yields no fewer than 35 hits, of which the most familiar is almost surely the first verse of Psalm 121 beginning "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." See all 35 hits here There are also 11 examples in John Wycliffe's earlier translation of the New Testament alone, and even the "21st-century King James Version" keeps "from whence" for the solitary case of the 121st Psalm, no doubt because the phrasing's so ingrained in Christians' biblical memory. [I earlier tried similar searches from on-line versions of Dickens and Shakespeare, but the search engine there doesn't seem to be working.] So, contrary to my earlier opinion, I don't think anyone (including you) should doubt the correctness of using "from whence". The more difficult question is where it would be better or more euphonious than "whence" without "from". "To whence" (as in "go back to whence you came") is actually more compact and elegant, if archaic, than any alternative I can think of ("back to where you came from", "go back where you came", "go back to from where you came", etc.) —— Shakescene (talk) 07:37, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The King James bible contains many usages that now sound archaic, and "whence" on its own occurs more often in that translation than "from whence", but I agree that your "to whence" usage is the neatest form. Perhaps it is just a matter of taste. Only 27 of your claimed hits are genuine. (Google is not always your friend.) The New International Version, the English Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, The Message, the New Living Translation and the Contemporary English Version (and other translations in modern English) have no instances of "from whence" so modern translators evidently consider this phrase to be obsolete or archaic. Dbfirs 17:42, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, I was using the count from Bible Gateway's own passage search of different versions, not Google. But then seeing the selection of bibles you searched (heavy on the Evangelical side), you must have been using Bible Gateway yourself. I agree that "whence" isn't common contemporary English: too often one can consciously or subconsciously think of "when", just as the "where" in "wherefore" has misled countless audiences in Juliet's Balcony Speech ("Wherefore art thou Romeo?). —— Shakescene (talk) 08:14, 17 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that they use Google, but I might be wrong. Their search engine certainly uses Google's annoying habit of returning finds whenever the words occur anywhere near each other. I searched the King James bible text using Word, where only exact matches are found. Dbfirs 16:36, 17 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

(after edit & archive conflicts) My mistake was not seeing the choice for "exact phrase" in a letter-box at the top. Using that, I got 27 results, too. If you enter "from whence" at a site that includes more of the Apocrypha, you'll see ten more hits (apparently in order) here, out of 82 for any "whence" Even for "whence" alone, the New Revised Standard Version yields no hits in its original American form (National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA), but the "Anglicized version" has one in the (far-from-universally-canonical) Fourth Book of Maccabees 13:12, here. (I may report later on what I found from searching the Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible (1582 & seq.), New American Bible and New Jerusalem Bible.) —— Shakescene (talk) 04:00, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What is the honorific treatment for a friar?

A Catholic priest is called father, as in "Father Raymond blessed this house". Is it correct to say "Fray Simon gave bread to the poor"? Fray is the treatment given to friars in Spanish. I'm currently working in the translation of the article National University of San Marcos from its Spanish version. There's been some controversy on whether Fray should be translated, but no one seems to know what would be the translation. Fray is used on other WP articles on historical figures who were friars, but the talk pages of such articles have the same unresolved issue. The question remain, when called by their name, what is the title that friars receive in English? Asinthior (talk) 04:09, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Friar Tuck was apparently called "Friar Tuck". -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 04:42, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fra Luca Pacioli. I don't see why Spanish and Italian friars should be treated differently. The best Wikipedian way to answer the question would be to look at any of the examples you found that use Fray and see how that person is named in reliable English-speaking publications (history books, Britannica etc). Then use that word in English, or if Fray is used, use this as a reliable reason to follow suit. Sussexonian (talk) 07:55, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the treatment changes in each language, men are treated by Mr. in English, Señor in Spanish and Signore in Italian. So Fra is the exact equivalent of Fray in Italian. The problem is to find the equivalent in English. I have no access to history books in English, but if Friar Tuck was actually called Friar Tuck, that should solve the issue. I'll perform a google search and see if the term is used in the same way in English as Fray is used in Spanish. Thanks for the help!! Asinthior (talk) 14:27, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Roger Bacon was definitely called "Friar Bacon" (at least in the sixteenth century) - see Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. However, it's a decidedly old-fashioned usage - a contemporary friar would probably just be called "John Smith OP", assuming he wasn't ordained priest. Tevildo (talk) 17:11, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you're going to use something other than Friar or Fra or Fray, I would suggest "Brother", which is a literal translation, and has frequently been used for monks. (Friars are basically monks without a monastery.) Looie496 (talk) 17:32, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Looie496 is right - I wasn't sure if friars (rather than monks) would be addressed as "Brother", but here's something that looks reasonably official [3] where a Franciscan cardinal is described as "Brother Wilfrid Fox Napier, OFM". Tevildo (talk) 19:59, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

(Edit Conflict) Modern Franciscans apparently call themselves "Brother" or "Br" for short. ~~Friars were chucked out of England at the Reformation and not allowed back in until the 19th century(citation needed) so~~ addressing them as "Friar" is probably rather archaic. Alansplodge (talk) 20:02, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't get that right - a history of Franciscans in England here.

So this is my fault for not providing more context. What you all say about Frair being a bit archaic is totally true, and actually that was the reason why I didn't know how to translate it. In modern Spanish, friars are called brothers. The section of the article I'm working on is the history of the university. As the oldest university in America (the continent) it was founded on the 16th century. Back then, friars were not called "hermano" (brother in Spanish) but fray, hence Friar Tuck being exactly what I was looking for. Since I'm not a native speaker, this is a character I'm not very familiar with, so I couldn't think of it by myself. Thanks again for all the feedback. Asinthior (talk) 22:47, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So the decision is that based on the Fray-ing pan, it's in with the friar? Clarityfiend (talk) 01:20, 15 May 2011 (UTC) [reply]

Oh, brother... --Jayron32 01:33, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Probably a bit late, but I've just remembered Friar Laurence. Alansplodge (talk) 22:45, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Interpretation of words spelled the same

"In just a minute I can give you a hand with that."
"In just a minute amount of air, you will find traces of Helium."

Despite both sentences beginning the same, I find it easy to read one word as /ˈmɪnɪt/ (1/60 of an hour) and the other as /maɪˈn(j)ut/ (very small). These are two separate words (AFAIK), and even though they are spelled the same, I have no trouble with reading the "correct" word, even before getting to the context clues in the rest of the sentence.

My question is: Is there a term/explanation for this kind of automatic reading comprehension? How does my brain know which word is which before I can determine it from context? ^Avic _ennasis @ 05:05, 10 Iyar 5771 / 14 May 2011 (UTC)

The words themselves are homographs but not homophones and so are heteronyms.

I can see no way you could possibly know which meaning is intended in either case, without reading the context, so I surmise you must read beyond the word "minute" but do so so quickly that you don't realise you've done it. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 05:10, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with J of O. Richard Avery (talk) 07:28, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Quite possible, I'm sure - Although it still kind of amazes me. :) ^Avic _ennasis @ 07:38, 10 Iyar 5771 / 14 May 2011 (UTC)

OK, try this test. Assume you've never seen these sentences before. Put a card over all the words after "In just a minute", in both sentences. Can you tell what comes next, in either case? Of course you can't. Now uncover the next word of both sentences - aha! it's already obvious the bottom one is referring to a small amount and not a unit of time. And the top one is probably the other one. When you look at a relatively short written sentence, you do NOT restrict your view to just the first word, then just the second word .... then just the last word. You see the whole gestalt, because your brain demands information in order to make sense of what it's taking in. It's probably far more complex than that, and I'm no expert on how the brain processes visual information. But suggesting you somehow just "know" which is the correct interpretation without ever seeing any of the context necessary to come to that conclusion is just fanciful, as I hope I've just demonstrated. (ec with Brainy Babe below, whose post is relevant to what I've been saying.)-- Jack of Oz [your turn] 09:45, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There is a phrase for this, although I can't remember it. It is known in the teaching of speed reading (and reading comprehension generally) that the eye -- or more correctly, the brain -- can see and absorb some distance around the point that appears to be its focus. It's a specific example of the usefulness of peripheral vision. BrainyBabe (talk) 09:34, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I know it as "chunking". When reading, we tend to read about 6 words at one time without realising it, and I have taught speed reading using this concept. --TammyMoet (talk) 16:35, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It works with numbers as well. Telephone numbers are best presented as separate chunks of digits rather than as one continuous series of digits, e.g. 5149 1274 is much easier to remember than 51491274, because we see it as 2 numbers each meeting the "5 plus or minus 1" condition, rather than 1 number that's too much. Or for mobiles, 0413 611 112 is better than 0413611112 - which is why the Yellow/White Pages always does it that way. I'm forever correcting clients' resumes about this. This is so incredibly basic, that it's apparently considered not worth teaching at school. Problem-solving techniques include breaking a gargantuan problem down into "smaller bite-size chunks" and working on each separately, and this works on exactly the same principle. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 18:24, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There's a good picture at Reading (process)#Methods that illustrates how we read. What's important to know is that fovea has very high visual spatial acuity, but it drops off from there. Things are blurrier the further they are from the thing you're looking at. But you can still sort of read the blurry words in the periphery, which gives you clues about the context of the current word. So when you're looking at the word "minute", you are also read the following words, and based on part of speech information, you pick one pronunciation or the other. ~~Andrew Keenan Richardson~~ 02:06, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

summarizing English language, history, and culture with a brief line or two of verse?

Which brief line or two of verse would best act as a reminder or summary of the English language, history, and culture (the primary emphasis being on language). To give you a better idea of the question, I imagine it would be by a preeminent writer such as Shakespeare or someone like Alexander Pope, it could be extremely densely packed with imagery, and it could be grammatically interesting enough to be worth remembering on that point as well. I imagine it would be by someone with a pretty sweeping ken.

So, some candidates for the kinds of things I am thinking of:

"Life is a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

This is interesting in that it summarizes life as a whole, is in English, and refers to the "storyteller" explicitly. Any other candidates? 78.92.80.250 (talk) 08:58, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" seems to capture something rather profound... --Jayron32 09:04, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This was from a letter to the editor on the subject of British citizenship, and how much immigrants should be expected to integrate or adapt. (Hence "British" rather than "English".) I paraphrase: "I always thought the best definition of Britishness is to be able to laugh at oneself, in English." Pithy! BrainyBabe (talk) 10:08, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My husband is fond of telling me of a book a German friend of his once showed him, which contained something like the following: "Throughout history, wars have been fought to decide which is the best race, colour, or creed. The British have never needed to fight such wars because they know they are the best race, colour and creed." I just wish he could remember what this book was!--TammyMoet (talk) 13:44, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wasn't it Cecil Rhodes who told someone: "You, sir, are an Englishman, and have therefore won first prize in the Lottery of Life!"? -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 18:10, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you want something inspiring, there is nothing better than the "band of brothers" passage from Henry V:

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.

Looie496 (talk) 19:35, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

o/~"The English are all that a nation should be, and the flower of the English is Donald and me!" Perhaps that doesn't work so well out of context, although it _does_ satisfy the "gramatically interesting" criterion as Swann has (correctly) put "is" rather than the more natural (but incorrect) "are". But it should also be "Donald and I", although that wouldn't rhyme. Tevildo (talk) 20:07, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why should it be "Donald and I"? Surely it is accusative, and hence "me" is not only natural, but perfectly pedantically absolutely correct? Is there an actual reason, or have you been muddled by being corrected to "x and I" so many times? 86.164.60.255 (talk) 11:26, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's not accusative, since it's not the object of a transitive verb. The verb is is followed by a subject complement, which is in the nominative case. Deor (talk) 12:45, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. :) To descend about as far into pedantry as is safe for this sort of discussion, the English cases are subjective and objective, not nominative and accusative. See English personal pronouns. More seriously, I can't think of any non-humourous verse specifically about the English language - The Chaos is widely cited, and there are many shorter rhymes on the subject of English orthography, but has any poet actively praised English as a language? Tevildo (talk) 15:19, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes; James Elroy Flecker wrote "O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, / Student of our sweet English tongue, / Read out my words at night, alone: / I was a poet, I was young."[4] ("To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence"). He's a bit neglected now but I love "The Golden Journey to Samarkand". Alansplodge (talk) 16:01, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

He is an Englishman!

For he himself has said it,

And it's greatly to his credit,

That he is an Englishman!

For he might have been a Roosian,

A French, or Turk, or Proosian,

Or perhaps Italian!

But in spite of all temptations

To belong to other nations,

He remains an Englishman!

-- AnonMoos (talk) 22:54, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I can't recall anything specific right now but I believe Rudyard Kipling's works could be worth examining. Roger (talk) 07:50, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, there's always John of Gaunt's dying speech from the first scene of Act II of King Richard the Second:

This royal throne of kings, This scepter'd isle,

This earth of majesty, This seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, This little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,...

This blessed plot, This earth, This realm, This England.

or more pithily (or some would say emotionally)

There always be an England, and England shall be free, if England means as much to you, as England means to me! [5]

—— Shakescene (talk) 08:34, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"To be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life", attributed to both Kipling and Rhodes. 92.28.245.12 (talk) 14:59, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I mentioned that (in slightly different wording) above. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 19:30, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Kardomah

This is an old tea and coffee brand name, founded in Liverpool in the 19th century, whose owners opened a chain of coffee shops (Kardomah Cafés) in England, mostly in the North, and Wales. I've googled the origin of the name, but the best I can find is hearsay that it's either Arabic or an Indian language and means 'pavilion'. Does anyone recognise it? --Heron (talk) 13:13, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There were still some Kardomah cafes in the City of London when I started work there in the 1970s. Watch this space... Alansplodge (talk) 19:05, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You could try asking at the Kardomah Blogspot. Some quite interesting stuff there not covered in the WP article (except of course, the origin of the name! Alansplodge (talk) 19:15, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I deliberately avoided using that blog as a source, to avoid contaminating WP with possible plagiarism. But it wouldn't hurt to ask about the name, I suppose. --Heron (talk) 19:35, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

All I can suggest I'm afraid, after half-an-hour of furious but fruitless Googling. Alansplodge (talk) 19:39, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have emailed the blogger and I'll report back if I learn anything new. --Heron (talk) 21:26, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

According to this result from Google Books; "At the Liverpool exhibition (1887) were sold the first cups of "Kardomah" tea, whose exotic name became that of a chain of cafeterias." The footnote links it to a book called "A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea" which suggests a Sinhalese origin may be more likely(?). Alansplodge (talk) 13:11, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This site implies that it was a word made up to sound exotic, deriving from Mikado. Ghmyrtle (talk) 13:31, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A pure guess: any connection to cardamom, which in some Arab cultures is used with coffee (and in Ethiopia with tea)? BrainyBabe (talk) 15:07, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I thought of that - it seems to come from the Greek word for cress [6]. The Arabic is Habbahan or Habbu al-hal.[7] Alansplodge (talk) 15:28, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a free-licensed list of the 65,536 most common English words?

There is a truly miserable piece of legislation proposed in the U.S. called the "Protect IP Act", a successor to the failed COICA. It strives to force search engines and DNS servers to censor results for sites accused of hosting copyright violations.^[8] I think it would be instructive to create a browser plug-in whereby people type in two or three English words, which are converted to a four or six number IP address which is then accessed. The first step is to find a free licensed or public domain list of more common English words which has 65536 entries (the word's position in the list determines its numbers). Ideally it would be possible to get the 65536 most common English words (with no duplication of entries according to whether they are capitalized), since that way any humdrum sentence a person cares to write contains as many IP addresses as words, minus one. Wnt (talk) 19:07, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There's a pretty good compilation of lists (not sure on the capitalization bit though) at wikt:WT:FREQ#English, a couple of which go out to as many as you are looking for. Lexicografía (talk) 01:49, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There are lots of freely available text corpora that have this sort of information. The Linguistic Data Consortium lists a lot of them. rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:38, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't see the LDC response when I started, but as I browse through these it seems like many (all?) of them are very much unfree. For this application it is best to have a list that is not merely free licensed but absolutely and irrevocably publicly available, even if the source were pressured to remove it from public access. I tried Wiktionary's Gutenberg text set, and it sort of works, with the caveat that it is very much not English. I worked it down to 67,000 entries by pulling out the most garbled stuff, and ended up with what I call the "a kanaka" set (because 127.0.0.1 translates to that). Wikipedia's IP of 91.198.174.232 translates to "pewter freundlichen", and Google's present 209.85.146.105 translates to "mauleon serment". It's unarguably a nice mnemonic aid - I could memorize the text 100 times faster than the IP number - but it isn't quite to the point where a given IP can accidentally come up in conversation. The Gutenberg list has a whole lot of this foreign crap, but it's missing nearly all of the ordinary common English words that I just think of off the top of my head. "muggy", "swordfish", "petunia", "firebrick" - that's 0 for 4 on a test I just did.

Perhaps I should reduce my request simply for freely licensed dictionary lists of English words, without looking for what is common - because even if there are really a million English words, I couldn't find more uncommon words in a dictionary unsorted by usage. Wnt (talk) 06:58, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

65,536 seems a lot. There may not be that many English words recognisable to the average English speaker. Of course, it makes quite a difference whether you count plurals and verb forms (-ing, -ed, -s) as separate words... 86.160.83.169 (talk) 13:54, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The article on English language suggests there might be a million words. Missing 4 out of 4 convinced me that a much larger set than the English subset of the Gutenberg frequency list should be possible. Wnt (talk) 18:12, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am pretty confident that almost all of those million words, if they exist, will not be recognisable to the average English speaker. I would be very suspicious of the quality of 60,000+ word list that doesn't contain the four you mentioned. I have a list of 59,000 words collected from various (non-free) sources. I am fairly sure it contains essentially every word that I know (including your four!), plus large numbers that I don't, plus some proper names, plus some garbage and non-words too. 86.160.83.169 (talk) 19:39, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, it's an enviable list. The U.S. doesn't have database copyright, so I doubt a mingled, flat, unsorted list of words from various sources is conceivably copyrightable. Is it available? Wnt (talk) 09:15, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am very sorry, but I have made a stupid mistake. I hadn't looked at that file for some time, but I remembered it was extremely comprehensive. I did a quick line count but misread the result. It is not c. 59000 entries but c. 590000. On this basis you may wish to ignore all my comments in this thread. 86.183.0.69 (talk) 12:51, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You may also be interested in the PGP word list 67.162.90.113 (talk) 23:32, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I looked into this and quickly moved over to S/KEY, an interesting alternative. It has a standard dictionary, and is relatively straightforward... except for an impossibly confusing parity scheme. I have RFC 2289 and RFC 1751 and looked into the examples, and sometimes it's all collinear (the words versus the bytes, that is) except for the last word, or the second word, or most of the words, and I don't know why at all. Using a Stupid Me version where I simply add a "1" at the end to fill out a set of three 11-bit words, and the standard 2048-word dictionary, 127.0.0.1 gets "up a act" (which I'll 'name' this method to distinguish it from others), Wikipedia gets "orb ike brad", and incredibly that Google IP I used above comes up as "coed bite arts", ISYN. Wikileaks' 64.64.12.170 comes up as "jim act gem" (the coincidental "act", because 64.64. and 0.1 both contain many binary zeroes). Since every word in the S/KEY scheme is four characters or less, the Google address is as long as a phrase can be in this system. Of course, it is possible that with such small dictionaries a sorting out could be done to make better parts of speech. The only deficiencies here are that a) it still lacks is my original desire to make it so that virtually any sentence contains IP addresses, such that it is truly impossible, even in concept, to distinguish "forbidden links" from "ordinary speech" and b) it just lacks a certain panache to use such a simple word set. Wnt (talk) 09:15, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This reminds me of RFC 1605 SRICE₁₃_{(TALK | EDITS)} 03:48, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Alas, this RFC from 4-1-94 lacks precision on the technical details. Wnt (talk) 19:20, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]