Talk:seldom

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Latest comment: 5 years ago by -sche in topic RFD discussion: April 2019
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'Seldom' is also an adjective. Some-one should add this to the article. 82.0.83.149 12:58, 27 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

RFD discussion: April 2019

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seldom as adjective

I was kind of amazed to find out that Wiktionary added "seldom" as an adjective, going as far as adding derivatives like "seldomer" and "seldomness", which simply don't exist!

I'm not a native English speaker, so I have seen "seldom" used as a synonym for "rare" by peers, as "seldom" is an adverb not ended in "-ly", making them use it erroneously as an adjective, e.g., "a seldom car", meaning "a rare car", or going the whole way to "seldomly used", instead of "seldom used".

I don't think that Wiktionary should incorporate a wrong word usage, even if that mistake is recurring in some groups.

For words which don't exist, people sure do seem to use them a lot. W.F. Colliers even included seldomer as an exemplar adjective in his dictionary. Other dictionaries (Oxford, M-W, AHD, etc.) include seldom as an adverb and adjective, some even mentioning seldomness as a noun form. It is a trait of languages that mistakes which are repeated often enough stop being mistakes and start being rules. In this case, however, the mistake is mostly in your assumptions about which words exist and which do not. - TheDaveRoss 15:57, 4 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
English writers have committed this error for quite some time; in fact, it saw print as early as 1609.  --Lambiam 17:43, 4 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
This is an RFV matter if you wish to pursue it, but from the comments above it seems likely it would pass RFV (indeed, it seems you know this and simply don't like it). As far as RFD is concerned, kept. - -sche (discuss) 17:59, 22 April 2019 (UTC)Reply