Talk:colourable

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Rfv-sense: that can be coloured. Not in my dictionaries, but could well be out there. Ƿidsiþ 08:00, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't this just colorable? Do we really need two distinct pages for these? In any case, I can find a few senses on the open web of colourable colouring books, but the only hits in b.g.c. are for colourable (or colorable) graphs, which is "that can be coloured" but arguably a more narrow definition.--Prosfilaes 14:37, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ah: "Authors, in general, have denominated the matter which, in these experiments, affords colour, the colouring parts of the vegetable. This matter, however, is not itself coloured, but is only capable of exhibiting colours, by the addition of other matters : and hence we have ventured to call it the colourable, rather than the colouring parts of the plant, by which we merely indicate its property of becoming coloured, but not its actual possession of colour." Farther inquiries into the changes induced on atmospheric air, by the germination of seeds, the vegetation of plants, and the respiration of animals, Daniel Ellis, 1811, pg. 117[1] or "The colouring material is totally soluble in water, and can be extracted from the ligneous matter by repeated decoctions or infusion. It exists in the wood in an almost colourless state, or at least its colour is only a pale yellow, but on coming into contact with air this hue becomes gradually darker, and at last red-brown. There appears to be slow oxidation of colourable matter to form a real pigment." A practical handbook of dyeing and calico-printing, Sir William Crookes, 1874, pg. 333[2]--Prosfilaes 14:47, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We would be much obliged if you could insert the complete citations in the entry in one of the appropriate places, using {{quote-books}} or otherwise conforming to the format. It is one excellent way to contribute to Wiktionary.

We usually have entries for all spellings. If there are no differences in sense etc one of the entries (usually the first common spelling entered) becomes the main entry with the other spellings being alternative spellings. DCDuring TALK 15:39, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are there citations available for the added senses of "plausible, covert and pretended"? Dbfirs 19:39, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For what little it's worth, they were added from colored, on the presumption they were different spellings of the same word.--Prosfilaes 01:12, 5 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've added two more cites, one referring to mathematics, and one referring to crayon coloring. That should be sufficient, no?--Prosfilaes 02:25, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The 1990 cite is for the alternative spelling, not the headword. DCDuring TALK 02:56, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wiktionary:Citations merges them all into one page, so I put them all under the main entry. In any case, you've added a replacement citation, so there are the requisit three cites.--Prosfilaes 04:58, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In Modern English, where there should be no shortage of citations, there is no reason to accept an absence of citations for each sense of the main word. I wonder whether colorable and colourable have the same sense distribution so that "alternative spelling" does not do justice to colorable. The situation with spellings is entirely different in Middle English and, to a lesser extent, in Early Modern English, which probably justifies more acceptance of alternative spellings for attestation of senses before, say, 1650 or later. DCDuring TALK 11:39, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In this case, the word at RFV has enough cites. In the larger case, there's a lot of words in Modern English that have multiple spellings. Spaces and hyphens are one group: e-mail/email, role playing game/role-playing game/roleplaying game. British/American differences are another: -ise/-ize and -or/-our. This is a derivative of color/colour, so it's going to automatically and silently changed by editors to match the local spelling standards.--Prosfilaes 18:57, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would challenge at least an entry if not a sense and would not accept any but the exact headword spelling and punctuation in Modern English. Users expect us to not legitimize words that aren't even attestable. I don't think that every sense of every word is attestable under all spellings, usually because the sense does not have actually much currency, not because of some artifact of the attestation process. Spelling differences can be a clue about sense differences between the US and the UK. The corpora we can conveniently use don't provide much other evidence, especially for older usage. DCDuring TALK 19:47, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I was not satisfied that The Hindu was durably archived, I out commented it and added another quotation. Interesting, that the sense is more common in America than Britain. Should it have a usage note? - -sche (discuss) 04:03, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Passed. I added a usage note. - -sche (discuss) 20:42, 26 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:colourable

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