User:Equinox
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Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
— Galileo Galilei
Notwithstanding their influence, we apprehend, however, that dictionary-makers are on the whole an oppressed race, doomed to more than their due share of obscure drudgery. […] They may have had their romance at home — may have been crossed in love, and thence driven to dictionarying; may have been involved in domestic tragedies — who can say?
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (volume 96), uncredited author
[T]he maximum number of revisions an author made is 237,600 for the English Wiktionary (user "Equinox") […] As an anonymous reviewer points out, this "sounds as [sic] an incredibly high number of revisions for one single user".
— Wolfer & Müller-Spitzer, How Many People Constitute a Crowd and What Do They Do?
Words, words, words, words! You may as well listen to the birds.
— Coil
Contents
About me
Hi. I've been on Wiktionary since mid-2008. My main interest is adding (legitimate) English words that we are missing. I seem to have done rather a lot of this.[1] In particular, I have added the missing material from Webster's 1913 dictionary (which has about 80,000 entries); created thousands of entries from lists of scientific terms, such as minerals, soil types, organic compounds, and pharmaceutical drugs; originated Appendix:Unicode (I fear I have birthed a terrible emoji monster); and added various words that I encounter in books, newspapers, and everyday life.
I'm on Wikipedia too, where I mostly make a fuck of a fuss about commas.
I have an HND in Applied Computing and a BA in English Language. I'm a software developer for a charity that I like a lot. I've done some other sucky jobs too like telesales :)
- Things I like: super-specialised senses of otherwise ordinary words (e.g. tick in birdwatching, policeman in chemistry); proper tagging of slang and rare senses; and words beginning with x.
- Things I don't like: blind prescriptivism; made-up phobias; folk etymologies; any editing "agenda" (Islam, Anglo-Saxonism, gender studies, etc., to the exclusion of actual real-world usage); and especially spam and commercial bullshit.
Subpages
Things to do, apart from adding words
- Why doesn't my headset work? I could record a zillion words. Try it on another PC. If it's super-quiet and broken even there, buy a new one.
- Download all pages and write a thing so I can fill in missing etys easily, e.g. obvious compounds and prefixes.
- With the same downloaded data: make a list of English entries with missing plurals, and create the missing ones that are correct.
- Ditto: deal with the initialisms and abbreviations that need a proper part of speech.
- Go through Special:WhatLinksHere/&c. and replace those prissy, attention-seeking "&c." links with "etc."
- Things not to do: finish my excellent desktop Wiktionary with loads of power-user shortcut keys, since templates change too fast and I would end up vandalising without knowing it. *cry*
Individual words to consider
- actisign adventral aerosoling Angloid anteventral antiaccelerator(s) antibioticogram antiblocker(s) anticonvertin antithromboplastin antitwist aviculoid
- basalar biamperometry biologistical bipotentiometry bivagotomy
- characean(s) codynamic comap(s) coperfect counterworld
- deathmaking downkeying draw stitch dyadism dysgranular
- ecocracy electrodiesel emissarial exobasidial
- famisign frange* futuritive
- gagemeter genorheitron gonidangium groundfield
- hexaaquacopper histial hyperphantasia hyperphoric(s)
- isidate
- megamodel (not fashion) melopoeia* (in poetry) microplane microshear microfusion,macrofusion (sth in Intel processors?)
- nexine nigerone
- (odso, rivo*: old or obscure interjections) onflow orthophoric(s) outpocketing(s) overcoded overnegation overpartitioning overscroll oxyhexaster
- palatinepterygoid paracritical parapsychics patchbay pelorine performatism phanopoeia poikilothymia poststack potisign preblockade prechopping premetacristid presegment(s) pushload
- radiothermic remoderate remoderation remoderator ribodeoxyvirus rockmass roomkeeper
- sacropexy saxifragoid(s) skeletoid spasmophilia suberyl subserial super-Locrian superquantum symphile synecthran syngenesioplastic synharmony synoekete
- technesis thapsane thermodifferential thromboembolus toolholder trackout
- undercoded undershoe upkeying usermode
- valleying
- whitewishing windowpaning
- IRC jargon: AOP*, SOP*
- Singlish particles: ah, hah, hor, lah, leh, lor, mah, meh, ya
- Soil science: entic epieutric eutric fibric fractiplinthic fragic gelic* greyichyperalic hyperdystric hypergypsic hypersalic isohumisol isohyperthermic kandic lamellic leptic lutic manganiferric ochric oxyaquic perudic petroduric petroferric petroplinthic pisoplinthic placic redoxic rendzic ruptic sabric salic sombric terric turbic umbric vertic vitron*
- A few qualifications: MChem, MEnvSci, MMath, MMet, MPharm, MPhys; see also Oxford's [2]
Other places to get words
- Wiktionary:Requested entries (English)
- Wiktionary:List of languages (language names)
- Neume: lots of terms for obsolete music notation
- Glossary of classical algebraic geometry (todo: I thru W)
- Glossary of architecture
- Glossary of botanical terms
- Glossary of contract bridge terms (continue from book)
- Glossary of motorsport terms
- Glossary of professional wrestling terms
- Glossary of underwater diving terminology
- Gamelan gong kebyar
- Professional wrestling throws
- Lichen#Sexual_reproduction
- Egyptian units of measurement
- Westminster_School#Westminster_jargon
- Eton College glossary [3] (copyrighted)
- List of diseases
- Eye surgery: lots of technical terms here.
- Horse jumping obstacles: e.g. coffin, bullfinch.
- List of optical illusions
- List of cocktails
- List of MeSH codes: links to thousands of scientific words
- Morphology of Diptera: many parts of fly anatomy (see labelled diagrams)
- South African English: [4] (copyrighted)
- Many organic compounds in Cystophora retroflexa: [5]
- Missing words from major dictionaries
- Missing words used in Wiktionary
- Get a random transwiki word or phrase (learn more)
- Antarctic slang: [6] (copyrighted)
- Terms in wine-tasting: [7] (copyrighted)
- Some good anatomical terms here: [8] (copyrighted)
- Appendix:Christian figures of speech
Features I would like to have
- Some kind of high-level platform-agnostic API that exposes the dictionary as objects (if only a collection of subheadings), not raw text.
- "Blame", as in software source control, to discover which user wrote a particular line of an entry.
- Standardisation of how templates work. Also, general accountability for templates, including pre-rollout consultation, testing, and backward-compatibility.
- Fix the dumb issue where various plug-ins load sequentially and stuff keeps jumping around so you can't click it.
Unpopular opinions
- We should get rid of (or drastically cut down) the misspelling entries. They are way out of control.
- Having separate alt-form pages for variants that differ only by case (Bloggs' disease, Bloggs' Disease) is somehow aesthetically displeasing. Furthermore, we should not have separate pages for titles like Admiral and Dame; just explain the usage at the normal form.
Wiktionarians I have met
- User:Conrad.Irwin: in Cambridge, late 2000s.
- User:Dominic: in London, 2009.
- User:Donnanz: in Oxford, 2017.
