I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.
Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.
May I introduce you to the German language?
We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).
Meanwhile, a Bahnhof would be a "Yard/square of lanes" if one didn't get taught that it's "train station". Although I suppose anyone learning German will quickly learn that "Bahn" is something to do with trains. Unless it's Autobahn. Or Schwimmbahn.
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.
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".
(In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)
Just the name gives me flashbacks to German-lessons in highschool.
Since 2004 the official guidelines for the german speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Swiss, Belgium, South Tirol, Liechtenstein, Romania, Hungary - see this founding document with the list: https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/wiener_erklaerung.pdf) are covered by the Rechtschreibrat (https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/).
The official german dictionary is here: https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6774
Also, from what I can tell using the site, it does not serve as a full dictionary. Rather, it lists the general rules of German orthography (as decided by the Rechtschreibrat) and has some limited tables of special words.
"Hackernewsleser" would be a word I just made up but every German can understand. A reader of Hackernews. Obviously this makes a dictionary tricky. And it has been a big problem for spell corrections in early MS Word Software.
“Honey, I’ve overheated the fondue! The problem is I can’t describe the liquid because English completely lacks any word that might be apposite in this situation other than the newly-minted ‘boiling water’.”
“It’s a problem. Maybe you could call it ‘boiling water that happens to be quite cheesy’. It’s not great, but it’s the best we can do.”
> Traditional dictionaries skip almost all such phrases, because they contain spaces.
Yes, because they're phrases, not words. I don't even understand what's surprising about this. Sure, the entire article talks about how dictionaries contain _some_ phrases; but it's clear it's not many of them. Dictionaries are for words, not phrases.
- A multi-word phrase is a phrase, not a word
- A lexeme is a basic unit of meaning in a language, like a word (and it's forms [1]) or phrase.
- Every place I was able to find described a lexeme as a "word _OR_ phrase", making it clear those two are different things.
- Dictionaries, in general, focus on words. Many do include phrases also. This point is less definitive; and just my understanding from looking at dictionaries and how they describe themselves. That being said, every source I can find that discussed something close to the topic seems to support this
[1] A word with all it's forms, in that "walk", "walked", and "walks" are all a single lexeme (with each form being a distinct word) OR a phrase
Side note: I'm not looking to "correct" anyone; just pointing out what information I'm able to find on the topic. I'm open to being corrected, but that correction would need to include reasonable sources.
- Don't put your hand in water that's boiling,
- Add the pasta to water that's boiling,
- That saucepan is full of water that's boiling.
If "boiling water" were a distinct word, all of these sentences would change meaning compare to their idiomatic counterparts.
The word "boiling water" is not currently found in the dictionary because the meaning has not been considered widespread or significant enough to justify inclusion. The article is pondering what line exactly defines widespread or significant.
Are there idiomatic expressions for warm/cold/dirty water, which mean something other than a literal adjective describing the temperature or condition of water?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hot%20water
> warm water - n. an ocean or sea not in the arctic or antarctic regions
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/warm%20water
> cold water - n. depreciation of something as being ill-advised, unwarranted, or worthless. e.g. threw cold water on our hopes
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cold%20water
Seems that what makes sense to be in dictionaries is already there.
Depending on the context you got sewage, slush, runoff, murk, waste etc.
"Boiling water should be performed in a metal pot".
All of these are ancillary and depend on context, but in every one of these downstream cases the same underlying process is happening: the water is boiling.
Not necessarily. It might refer to heating water to bring it to a boil.
Q. What are you doing over there?
A. Oh, just boiling water.
As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice.
So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.
Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder.
But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals.
> But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals
Water at freezing temperature can get much colder without freezing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling:
“Water normally freezes at 273.15 K (0.0 °C; 32 °F), but it can be "supercooled" at standard pressure down to its crystal homogeneous nucleation at almost 224.8 K (−48.3 °C; −55.0 °F).”
But the semantic point still stands. Boiling water is still water -- in the specific sense of H2O in its liquid state -- while ice is not. The complaint that frozen water has a single-word synonym while boiling water does not is making a false equivalence.
Frozen water represents a state change and that different state commonly gets its own word: ice/water/steam equates to solid/liquid/gas
Boiling/freezing water represents the state of the liquid, not the transition. Its descriptive. Water boils away into steam, or freezes into ice.
Should we consider luke-warm water also singular? What about body-temperature water? cool water? It makes sense not to treat adjectives/descriptive words combined with the subject as singular because the definition already exists in the root of the words (meaning of adjective word + meaning of subject word). Blue clay is another example, why would that be a singular?
It really only makes sense to me in the rare cases where the combination words represent something different or non obvious than the combined meanings of the two words (i.e to 'give up')
We have a lot of words for "frozen water" because it takes a lot of forms. As far as I know "boiling water" is only one thing so we've never needed additional words to distinguish it.
Ice cream is a shortened pronunciation.
There are some attestations to it from 1732 onwards: https://archive.org/search?tab=fulltext&query=%22iced+cream%...
The attestations for ice cream (or often ice-cream, as these open compound words used to often be hyphenated -- the loss of that hyphen eventually leading to articles like this one) are much, much more and much messier, not least because someone tagged every edition of The Gentleman's Magazine as being published in 1731 -- the Internet Archive is a fantastic resource but I wish they'd allow crowd sourcing corrections for metadata. Excuse the m-dashes.
You may be right that it was mostly called ice cream at first and eventually at last. To be honest I took the Wiktionary etymology at its word.
Of course is like an abbreviation of something like ‘in the natural course of things’. Which has become more like just ‘yes’ over time. In the usage of ‘yes’ it’s easier to argue it could be one word.
The chef was out the back, boiling water.
The chef was out the back. Boiling water had spilled everywhere.
The seas had turned to boiling water.
I dunno, could be down to interpretation.
Which is why "state of matter" is, itself, often in the dictionary, possibly to the dismay of the Team Single Word in this comment section.
In talking about the validity of the suggested compound word "boiling water", an example of exactly what the article is talking about arises: when exactly does a sequence of invididual words (state, of, matter) become more than the sum of its parts?
A further question raised by your comment is does the existence of a compound word with a specific meaning then rule out use of the same words in a less specific manner? Perhaps for maximum clarity of expression, it's confusing, but is it wrong? It's an interesting point because if you didn't know the special meaning of the compound word "state of matter" then there is a word out there that is, completely unknown to you, invalidating your writing which would otherwise be correct both syntactically and semantically.
The general consensus among the HN crowd here seems to be quite vehement that "boiling water" has not reached the point where it "deserves" a dictionary entry. But there are words in many dictionaries like "cherry blossom" that I would say are little more deserving.