Talk:body of water

RFD discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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body of water, right? You can also have a body of air, a body of ice, a body of sand, and most likely a body of any other substance that occurs in large quantities (Google finds plenty of relevant hits for body of gravel and body of magma). From a translation perspective, it might be slightly useful, but most of the translations look SOP too, with the exception of German and maybe Finnish. That said, we do currently seem to lack a proper sense of body for this - presumably it should be a subsense of 4. Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:34, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I've put an extra subsense at body to cover this meaning. Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:42, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Delete. DAVilla 11:14, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Delete now that we have a def and usage example at [[body]]. DCDuring TALK 12:12, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

• Keep outside of CFI, as this seems to be the most common term referring to the semantic node in the taxonomy that includes rivers, lakes and bays; see Google Ngram view for "body of water", "waterbody" and "water body". As regards interesting translations, German "Gewässer" is one: it is not a compound. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:48, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
  • But the same is true of, for example, pile of hay vs. haypile, pane of glass vs. glasspane or stack of wood vs. woodstack. The fact that some word phrase is the most common way of referring to some concept doesn't mean it definitely deserves a place in a dictionary. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:52, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
    • The same is not true. You have picked only one thing from my sentence and ignored the rest. The term "pile of hay" does not refer to a significant semantic node in a taxonomy. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:49, 31 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep: Good god, another example of ridiculous SOP RfDing Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 16:03, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep: Has sigleword idiomatic translations, so at least keep as translations target. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 16:16, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep. This is a discrete geographical concept; e.g. a bath tub full of water would be not considered a body of water. ---> Tooironic (talk) 23:39, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

  Would the air in an (otherwise) empty tub be considered a "body of air"? DAVilla 23:12, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

  There are plenty of hits on Google Books for "body of air", what's your point? Have no idea why you guys want to delete this discrete concept. ---> Tooironic (talk) 23:28, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

  The point is that you can have a "body" of very many things. BODY + OF + WATER. There's no hidden meaning here. It's just the basic skill of being able to place words together. MY + GREEN + HAT. Your claim about nobody using this phrase for e.g. a bath is also wrong: see e.g. [1] "A modification of the short hopper has the bend of the trap raised, so as to hold a larger body of water in the basin". Equinox ◑ 14:11, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

  But your argument is illogical. Just because a phrase can also be deciphered literally by its components in some very limited contexts doesn't mean we can't keep the primary idiomatic interpretation of the phrase. There are plenty of examples of this in Wiktionary already; I didn't see how this entry is any different. ---> Tooironic (talk) 21:28, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

  By the way, there are currently 17 definitions of water under 3 different categories. Many non-native speakers of English (and possibly young or uneducated native speakers) would struggle to understand the phrase just by looking up water. This is not really the main argument for keeping this phrase but it's something first mentioning nonetheless if we want Wiktionary to be a truly accessible dictionary. ---> Tooironic (talk) 21:33, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

"Body of water" is not a free collocation, it is defined as "the part of the earth's surface covered with water" at The Free Dictionary. I also want Russians to know how to say "водоём" in English, Germans - "Gewässer". I have the word on my electronic Chinese-English dictionary. I don't see why the word should be excluded. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:11, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

We are a dictionary of words, not concepts. Concepts are for Wikipedia. --WikiTiki89 14:15, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

• Delete. I completely agree with everything Smurrayinchester has been saying here. --WikiTiki89 11:10, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
• Delete. Equinox ◑ 23:23, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep. An obvious dictionary term included in multiple monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:38, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep, per Tooironic above regarding specialised geographic terminology. Leasnam (talk) 19:22, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep to avoid confusion with Zan, of the Wonder Twins ("form of... water!"). For those whose memory does not reach that far back, start at about 3:15. bd2412 T 15:52, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

  @BD2412, Honestly, I don't think that's a different sense. --WikiTiki89 15:57, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

• Keep. It is a geographical term with a specific definition. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 05:34, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
• Keep. As Tooironic points out, this term has a non-SOP sense (its primary one, in fact, and the one we have for it): the sense that excludes my bathtubful of water.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:51, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I moved the translations to "waterbody", an un-challenged synonym. --Hekaheka (talk) 19:31, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

That strikes me as a far rarer term - a quick google books search suggests that it is restricted to scientific/geographical/hydrological works [2]. So I'm not sure that it is an exact synonym. Furius (talk) 19:56, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Kept. (Closing despite my own participation because it seems just about everyone has participated in the discussion, and the outcome is not in doubt). bd2412 T 03:11, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Non-figurative sense?

What else could it be other than the first definition? Like a body of something/somebody that is composed of water? lattermint (talk) 03:44, 2 July 2023 (UTC)