Talk:gills

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

Does this deserve its own entry with translations, or just an inflection page like other plurals? I'm not sure how to format it- if the plural form is more common than the singular does it get its own entry? Nadando 21:54, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

The policy on that has not yet really been decided. There are a number of folks who think that all entries should get full entries, while there are others (such as myself), who think that such a policy is impractical, and that all useful information should be transferred to gill, and gills turned into an inflected form entry. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 22:01, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

The entry is not complete. Until I just added it, it didn't even have a link to the singular. It doesn't have the second etymology. If it had an image, would it be necessary to have multiple gills in the picture? It thought that we at least had a policy against translations and semantic relations for plural entries. A typical minimal plural entry would be the one for booklets. DCDuring TALK 04:38, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Two things surprise me in looking at the current entry on gill (after the changes based on the above):

1. There is nothing here to indicate that it is a word far more commonly found in the plural, don't we indicate things like that? I would think we should, it's somewhat unusual.
2. Nothing to lead to the common expression "stewed to the gills", whose meaning would be by no means obvious to a non-native speaker. Don't we usually indicate colloquial meanings like this? (I don't spend a lot of time with Wiktionary, but that's something that as a user I'd expect of any good dictionary.)

Jmabel 00:04, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Good points. DCDuring TALK 00:17, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

On-line dictionaries present it singular as we do without making any special reference to the plural. A parallel case is "eye". Because, standard-issue mammals have two eyes, much usage is in the plural. Similarly "bone". In popular parlance, "gill" can refers to the opening and not to the organ or organs within the animal (not necessarily a fish). "to the gills" certainly warrants an entry, and probably "stewed to the gills" as well, both linked to "gill". DCDuring TALK 00:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, this isn't the same as eye or bone. The problem is that, although it is easy to point to an individual eye or bone, one rarely ever sees a single gill. Fish do not have two gills; they have two pouches, each containing gill arches, each of which bears "gills". This is a case more like the reverse of (deprecated template usage) hair, where "hair" is used to mean an individual strand or all the hair on the head or body. For (deprecated template usage) gills, the plural is used to mean either a particular unit (plural) or collectively all the gills on an animal. And while zoology books may list "eye" or "bone" (both singular) as a topic in the index, typically the plural form "gills" is used this way in the index. --EncycloPetey 03:23, 14 August 2008 (UTC)