Talk:sick

Use as a noun

What about: We have to cure the sick.

Isn't sick a noun there? If it is a noun, is it a plural then? Polyglot 10:04, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Good suggestion! I'm not sure how such nouns are classified in English. There are similar nouns based on adjectives and used collectively and uncountable rather than singular or plural. "The rich" and "the poor" are other examples which spring to mind. I know these are a special case in Spanish which take the rare neuter article, "lo" as in "lo pobre" etc.

Should this be "Collective noun" or is that term reserved for things such as "a murder of crows"?

Hippietrail 10:40, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It's called (by some grammarians) an "adjectival noun": an adjective used as a noun. Basically, "the xyzzy" is used as a kind of shorthand for "the ones who are xyzzy". Since this can be done with just about any adjective (the elderly, the poor, the artistically inclined, etc.), I don't think it should be considered a noun. The offline dictionaries I've seen don't, as a general rule.

N.b. There's another thing called an "adjectival noun" by other grammarians, just to keep things confusing: a noun used as an adjective, as "disk" in "disk drive", or "gift" in "gift horse". But that's another topic. -- Ortonmc 16:24, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

We have to cure the sick uses a substantive, which means it is still an adjective but the word it describes (people) is implied. Other examples include the meek shall inherit the earth, the righteous shall suffer, etc. 69.175.92.53 03:47, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Our entry on the word substantive includes this meaning with the example the meek shall inherit the earth and defines it as an adjective used in place of a noun, which I don't think is precisely correct. I'm not sure enough to change it though. 69.175.92.53 03:49, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Excellent Dude, that was Sick!

I've heard sick used by skateboarders, surfers and snowboarders extensively, but only in the US. Rather than calling it a British/Australian term, should it be listed in the sporting contexts it started in (it is now a common term.) --Connel MacKenzie 03:08, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I remember seeing this in an ad for a snowboarding event in early 2004 and it was the first time I ever saw the word used that way. I remember it said "GET SICK!" at the bottom of the flyer. The wider sense of "sick = good" seems to have gone mainstream between then and now, but I've still never heard it used a verb (or verbal complement). Soap (talk) 00:32, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I saw it this year on a British Twitter feed for one of the university societies. They said that a certain event was going to be a "sick night". (Something like a sick day? Heh.) Equinox ◑ 14:06, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

It's definitely slang but it's pretty common. I have described someone as a 'sick bastard' after seeing his juggling video. By which I mean 'very awesome person'. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:18, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

The sick-the disruptive or the evil

Though it seems unPC to give this definition, the word needs to be defined properly. You can't just define 'the sick' as 'the sick' as it seems to be doing now.

verb or adjective?

The sense used in "When I heard what she ate for lunch, I felt like I was gonna be sick!" is rather ambiguous. I would suggest it be a verb, as, "...I was gonna be vomiting" but am adding this as an adjective ... Can anyone verify if it is an adjective or verb (or noun)? In any case, this wasn't directly contained in any of the senses given. Sense 4 "having the urge to vomit" did come close however.

• • That's a verb. SemperBlotto 08:33, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm also changing the examples: "My car is looking pretty sick." and "My job prospects are pretty sick." to the slang sense "awesome". As far as my English goes, they imply positivity in these contexts. -- 203.171.195.146 05:39, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

• • I don't think so. SemperBlotto 08:33, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

I think be sick could be considered a single unit where the be and the sick aren't separable. I'd strongly favor an entry for it unless there's some evidence I haven't thought of. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:20, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

We've had it since 2008; good. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:21, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Deletion discussion

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sick

Noun: sick people in general as a group. Not a noun but an adjective. Hence should not be listed as a noun. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:07, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

This comes from a grammatical rule that allows adjectives to mean "the group of X people," as in "the rich" and "the poor." I see that we have this noun sense for "poor" but not "rich." Allowing this usage, opens the door for others like "the beautiful," "the bold," etc. --BB12 (talk) 23:25, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

In theory, there are tests of whether an adjective can also be a noun or not, see Talk:minacious. - -sche (discuss) 00:23, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

This grammatical rule applies widely to adjectives. For example, if I make a posting on Facebook and three people make snarky remarks, it would be naturally to say, "I see the snarky are out in full force today." I think this noun use should be stricken for sick and poor. --BB12 (talk) 09:17, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

If this is not a noun, why does it occur modified by such determiners as many, any, no, some, few as well as the [1]? Is that a general property of adjectives? It is true that, in contrast with affluent, one cannot find this as sicks. One can find it in much more than attestable numbers as a possessive: "general silence reigned, and all the lights below were out, with the exception of a single lamp in the sick's apartment, where lay the remains of Kemble."

I don't think that every adjective displays all of this behavior. Perhaps the existence of a plural form in -s would be the most demanding test, though it would not apply to mass nouns. DCDuring TALK 10:16, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Very nice search algorithm! Try replacing "sick" with "rich" and with "poor." You'll see plenty of hits. There's even one relevant hit for "affluent." These are adjectives being used as nouns via a grammatical rule. --BB12 (talk) 11:11, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

But it is a very restricted set of adjectives for which conversion to noun occurs, even in this semantic-preserving way. Try finding incongruous or pallid or stony used with determiners, with -'s, or with -s. Not all adjectives that convert to nouns and the boundaries of the set are not obvious, probably not even with a linguistics PhD. 16:00, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

No consensus to delete. bd2412 T 16:06, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

The shorter and more frequent an adjective, the more likely is it perhaps to be used this way, but every adjective that can refer to people can be so used in principle. It's not a small set of adjectives, not even a "set" at all. I can say: "Health insurance should cover makeup for the pallid." That's correct English. And, actually, I've even found the construction with "incongruous", as a neuter singular, here: [2]. Kolmiel (talk) 22:44, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

My note refers to use with definite article. Maybe the generality of this rule hasn't been doubted. Use with determiners is another thing. Kolmiel (talk) 22:57, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

RFC discussion: March 2011

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sick#Noun

The inflection line looks wrong, since it does not correspond with definition two. Caladon 09:07, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Move the so-called noun to rfd using {{rfd-sense}}. Needy is already at rfd for this same reason. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:48, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

RFV discussion: November–December 2020

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sick

Rfv-sense "Having an urge to vomit.". This was presumably meant to account for get sick ("I got sick all over the floor"), be sick ("I'm gonna be sick!"), but is it ever used outside of those phrases? If it does exist, it probably shouldn't be the first sense listed.__Gamren (talk) 08:50, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

There's also the common use of "I feel sick" for "I feel nauseous or like I am going to vomit", which I've added some citations of (going back a century). Lexico, a paper Concise Oxford English Dictionary I checked, Dictionary.com, and Merriam-Webster all have this sense, MW with two other common collocations ("sick to one's stomach", "was sick in the car"). I think a person can be carsick, or can be sick in the car, or can get sick whenever they ride in a car, without actually vomiting, so the current definitions of be sick and get sick as "vomit" do not cover that use (although perhaps both of those entries should be updated). I'm surprised we list this as the first sense (I would reorder it and what is currently sense 2), but it's real. Incidentally, is sense 2 ("ill") really "chiefly US"? Lexico and the Concise OED do not mark it as dialectally restricted (nor do the two American dictionaries); I know "ill" is more common or more idiomatic in British English in a variety of circumstances, but would not have taken "sick" to be restricted (or "chiefly" restricted) to American English. - -sche (discuss) 19:10, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Cited, IMO. - -sche (discuss) 00:45, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 06:10, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

RFD discussion: September–December 2020

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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sick

poor

blind

deaf

tone-deaf

(jobless, unemployed, living, dying, pre-dead, dead)

(wounded, happy, wealthy, well-to-do, wicked)

RFD for the noun sense "Sick people in general as a group." Second nomination. This nomination also applies to any English adjective used nominally in this way, as this can be done with virtually any adjective, especially ones that apply to people in a certain condition but can also apply to other things. I included a few examples I've found of entries that have this, but I probably missed a lot, and that's an unfortunate remark for me to have to make here.

To give you an idea of how repeatable this is, you could form the rich, the wealthy, the snotty, the good, the bad, the ugly, the fake, the real, the ridiculous, the stupid, the smart, the happy, the curious, and the list goes on. Need I name more? Should we have a noun form for all those entries, and many more? PseudoSkull (talk) 02:35, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Previous discussion (with links to other previous discussions): Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2015/October#Nominalized Adjectives. —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:20, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

I'm sympathetic to the view that because any adjective can be so nominalized, it's a matter for WikiGrammar. (I think we should mention such things on our "About English" / "English entry guidelines" pages, until WikiGrammar exists as its own project or namespace.) So, weak delete. Any relevant details—one mentioned in the BP thread is that they take plural verbs—could be added to the relevant sense of the ("Used before an adjective, indicating all things (especially persons) described by that adjective"), and illustrated by usexes in the adjective sections. (Citations could also illustrate cases where an adjective is relatively common without "the", e.g. in headlines: "Poor to die without new aid bill", "Irish head to polls tomorrow" etc.) - -sche (discuss) 18:14, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

There are also cases of terms having one POS being used as having another POS. For example, German adjectives can also be used as adverbs: hoffnungslos verloren means “hopelessly lost”, and adjectives can be nominalized: ein Abgelehnter is “a rejected person”, and das Lustige is “the funny side” of something. In other languages, such as Turkish, semantic plurals are often morphologically unmarked: omlet yapmak için yumurta kırmak gerekir (“you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”). If something like this is a regular and predictable feature of a language, we should not register it for individual instances.

We should delete them, but is there a systematic way of finding all instances of English adjectives listed as nouns with a collectibe sense? The collective noun senses of deaf and poor are categorized as pluralia tantum, those of sick and tone-deaf as collective nouns (without stating that they function as plurals), and that of blind is not categorized at all. Of the noun forms produced above by PseudoSkull, I think haphazardly, happy and wealthy also have collective senses listed, so there must be plenty more.  --Lambiam 13:08, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 16:42, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Delete. Equinox ◑ 18:15, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Somewhat reluctant Delete all as a regular feature of English that does not need explaining separately each time, unless anyone can demonstrate why we should include some but not others. Mihia (talk) 22:13, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

It is difficult. These are what I usually call 'systematic polysemy', i.e., a sense extension that can be "extended" in all cases. Other examples are "room" meaning "the people in a room" (the whole room burst out laughing, the whole concert hall burst out laughing, the whole garden shed burst out laughing - must've been a good joke), and "Chinese" meaning the food or a meal of such food (last night we had Chinese / Japanese / Korean / Mongolian / Albanian ?). Most other dictionaries go down the path of including specific entries for the most common ones, e.g. the unemployed, the jobless, the rich, the poor, the blessed, but not others that are also pretty common, the ultrarich, the megawealthy, and definitely not ones that are less common, the happy, the impecunious, the unconcerned, not even the meek though they shall inherit the earth, eventually, apparently. But, how do they test for such commonality, and what is their cut-off point? I suspect they use native-speaker intuition and a sense of what people are likely to want to look up. It is a bit of a can of worms. One possible way forward would be to institute a high number of cites to meet CFI for cases of systematic polysemy - say 20 independent cites - which would potentially put off nutbags who want to create noun defs for every adjective in the dictionary. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 19:36, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Delete all. This is a grammatical, not a lexical, phenomenon, and grammar tends to be complicated and messy. It isn't limited to just simple adjectives: phrases can do this too. Do we want entries for "the extremely wealthy", "the merely sick", "the recently widowed", etc.? Note that these have adverbial modifiers, not adjectival, so it's not a modification of the adjective as a noun, but of the adjective before it's converted to a noun. In fact, these nominalized adjectival phrases can take adjectival modifiers, too: "not all of the recently widowed are old". There are also compound adjectives: "the poor and lowly" "the sick and dying", etc. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:46, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

This is a good point, especially regarding "widowed", which shows that speakers can even do this with words that seem to be verb forms (or at least, don't seem to meet any other tests of adjectivity), like google books:"the killed were", google books:"the recently killed". Noun all the words, and verb "noun"! (Actually, how do we feel about that, the use of any word as a verb? It inflects, e.g. "nouned", which means there's somewhere more reason to give such things their own POS section than there is with the tone-deaf.) - -sche (discuss) 15:39, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Keep all but prefix with 'the' - the poor, the sick, ... -- Dentonius (my politics | talk) 18:08, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Delete all. J3133 (talk) 18:09, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Delete all. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 18:51, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Delete all. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:13, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Several more entries which have noun senses like this that will presumably need to be deleted, if we decide that such things are to be deleted: happy, unemployed, jobless, living, dying, pre-dead(!), dead, wealthy, well-to-do, wicked, and wounded (compare walking wounded which has no adjective section). (I added headers for those.) Also old. An interesting case is young, which can mean both "people who are young" and "young or immature offspring (especially of an animal)", where the second feels a bit more idiomatic to me; I'm not sure what to do there. I would suggest that we should add "nounal" usexes to the relevant adjectives if these nouns are deleted. (By the way, left and right have partially similar senses, but they have more merit, IMO.) A lot of ethnicity / nationality terms also have senses like this; what do we want to do with them? E.g. Irish, Scottish, English, Manx, Welsh, French, Swiss, Abenaki. - -sche (discuss) 05:56, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

It is indeed a complete can of worms, as someone said above, as to on what grounds include some but not others. "Of course" we should keep the "young of an animal" sense, which is not (exclusively) an example of the "the + adj" formula, e.g. you can say "her young" or "these young" -- and yet equally one can find "some unemployed" or "these unemployed" used to mean "some/these unemployed people". So ... Mihia (talk) 00:14, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

I've started to make these deleted, moving nounal usexes up into the adjective sections. I have also retained the translations, the inverse of retaining adjective translations of things that in English are only nouns, as on cork and brass, as DCDuring and I discussed elsewhere once. - -sche (discuss) 17:27, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

distressed

Spiritually or emotionally distraught, sick with worry --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:55, 24 June 2021 (UTC)