Thesaurus talk:jail
Latest comment: 2 months ago by -sche in topic RFM discussion: June 2023–March 2024
The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).
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Is there a maintainable distinction here? The pages claim that jail is pre-trial and prison is post-trial, but our entries define both as being for those awaiting trial as well as those being jailed/imprisoned, and most of the entries listed on Thesaurus:jail are for places people are confined long-term post-sentence (so according to the claimed distinction, belong on the other page). My initial inclination is that it'd be better to merge these. - -sche (discuss) 01:53, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
- It would be a further demonstration that our thesaurus entries don't have explanatory value, whatever their value for writers and translators and others who need to be reminded of words they at least recognize. It's a small niche, but the explanatory thesaurus of my dreams has yet to be written. DCDuring (talk) 02:31, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
- I think the words are synonymous and interchangeable in most varieties of English. — Sgconlaw (talk) 04:41, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
- In a narrow technical sense in some jurisdictions, these are distinct- but thesaurus entries are about more than a narrow technical sense. The second is really a subset of the first- there's nothing about the wording in the first one to exclude anything that goes in the second. The result is that the first has three times as much as the second, with considerable redundancy between the two and even a few terms like can, clink, jug and slammer in the second one that aren't particularly associated with long-term incarceration. The imbalance can be at least partly corrected by sorting through everything, but it would be far easier to just move everything in Thesaurus:prison to Thesaurus:jail that isn't already duplicated there. We could even have a section set aside in Thesaurus:jail for long-term facilities. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:05, 15 June 2023 (UTC)