Wiktionary:The Headword/Issue 1
By Vininn126
Some time ago TranqyPoo mentioned that Wiktionary needs more culture—I wholeheartedly agree. I think Wikipedia has almost TOO many fun side things, but Wiktionary is nigh bereft of anything like this and I think some shared, non-entry culture is a good way to connect editors.
From the editors at Wikimania 2026, Juwan discovered Actualités du Wiktionnaire, and so a discussion thread and initial drafts were started. Sections were proposed, and we have filled out sections as best possible for this first issue. The formatting is nowhere near as pretty as it is on French Wiktionary, though it is a humble start.
This journal is supposed to be a place where editors will be able to voice their thoughts, announce their accomplishments, and make silly creations regardless of any ideological views they may have. This first issue was managed mostly by me; may it grow into something bigger.
Why a journal? Our goal with this journal is to:
- Disseminate knowledge that can help editors work more effectively.
- Write high-quality, peer-reviewed linguistics articles with a particular focus on Wiktionary.
- Provide a forum for debating various editing "ideologies", like inclusionism v. deletionism.
- Keep the community updated on pertinent news and goings-on, but without amplifying pointless drama.
- Allow editors to showcase their creativity and contribute to Wiktionary culture.
If any of these appeal to you, please consider contributing to the journal!
- An updated visual editor for entry creation was developed on French Wiktionary.
- A recent vote has started to decide on creating a namespace for constructed languages.
- A future vote on the policy on artificial intelligence is under discussion.
Updates to individual communities
- Akan reaches over 1,000 lemmas thanks to the efforts of SinaSabet28.
- English now has 100,000 terms with IPA pronunciation.
- Polish hits 100,000 lemmas on 26 July 2026.
- A mass clean-up of 1,900 Tarifit lemmas (all of them!) was done by Lankdadank.
- OpinionThe future of Foreign Word of the Day
- The lexicographerInterview with Juwan
- The vandalReconstructing language stages into the future
- Traffic reportTraffic report
- Symbol of the monthThe International Symbol of Access
From my perspective, it seems that anyone who takes up the task ends up leaving it sooner rather than later. We've had more days without FWOTD, and we're seeing established editors leave.
I don't want to lose either; I don't want to lose good editors and I don't want to lose Foreign Word Of The Day. Wiktionary needs more editors as it is, so losing long-term editors is that much bigger of a loss. I also want to showcase foreign languages and the uniqueness that got me interested in linguistics while also showing off our work and what our project has to offer.
When the idea of a journal was proposed, I knew that I wanted to write about FWOTD first. I decided to ask the editors about their experiences editing. The full interview will be published at the end of the article - I highly recommend reading it as much more can be gleaned from their experience directly.
There are some immediate conclusions. The nomination process appears to be broken. There is both a wealth and dearth of nominations. There are so many nominations, but so few of them are ready to be presented, that weeding through all of them is overwhelming, and having to do that every day is exhausting. The lack of ready nominations has a second layer - once editors actually find a page ready to made, they find that it's usually a nomination in one of the more well-maintained languages. I personally have contributed to this, a while ago Lingo Bingo Dingo asked me to nominate more pages, I suppose at the time there was a similar problem and the remedy was to ask more people to nominate ready pages. So I obliged and began nominating Polish entries left and right. I suppose now at least there's enough there, but the problem is we need so much more. We need high-quality entries in many more languages.
What can we do?
Both Justin and TranqyPoo said that more hands on deck would help a lot. Between nominating more entries that are ready to be featured and maintaining the beast that is the nomination page, it seems that this needs to be a community project. I have also seen the discord channel for FWOTD help them organize things. Nominations also need to be good and featurable - Justin mentioned gamifying the system. Perhaps we could entice users to make entries more ready and nominate the most interesting by rewarding somehow. To spitball an idea, perhaps a system similar to barnstar where you can count the number of entries you've had nominated (or perhaps made?) displayed on your userpage?
Work is being done to reorganize the mammoth nomination page. I think this is also crucial in keeping the project alive.
In terms of families of nominations, Justin mentions the classic forgotten families; TranqyPoo offers an interesting insight in suggesting featuring more constructed languages. Perhaps if the supposed namespace for conlangs passes, then this could become more viable.
We can also hear from other Wiktionaries to see their experience with WOTD, for example, pl. recently implemented it. From an outside perspective, it seems they often have days where a word isn't set and someone has to mention. Noé from fr. (where not only do they have a WOTD and FWOTD, but even a Thesaurus of the day!) mentioned a solution to recycle old WOTD's - perhaps this could be expanded so that readers can see how a page has grown from the last time a recycled entry was WOTD, but having a fallback would probably take off some of the burden.
In a similar vein, looking to our WOTD, currently curated by, Sgconlaw, the story is starkly different. It would seem that focusing on a singular language helps the process. If an entry needs an overhaul before it can be featured, it can receive one, in contrast to FWOTD, where often our editors have no idea how to improve a page before nominating it. This has the added benefit of giving motivation to reworking a page, it leads to some particular goal. Focusing on one language also seems to give Sgconlaw more power in selecting, allowing them to focus on things like diversifying which parts of speech are featured. The main block appears again to be nominations of pages that aren't ready to be featured.
What do you think? For readers of Wiktionary, what is your experience with WOTD and FWOTD? For editors, what do you think is the way forward?
@Lingo Bingo Dingo, @Justinrleung, @TranqyPoo I will be using this space to ask you all questions for the upcoming piece. Upon receiving answers, I may ask further questions.
I'd like to start with FWOTD.
From an outside perspective, it seems that users who very often take up dealing with FWOTD burn out very quickly. Is this true for you, and if so, why? And what is needed to help make this process more maintainable? What does the process for selecting a word look like?
I'd also like to know why you took up curating FWOTD. Do you find it enjoyable? Do you think it's worthwhile to continue?
What languages, language families would you like to see more often?
Do things like focus weeks help in the process?
With regard to WOTD, @Sgconlaw, it seems like you never run out steam. Do you sometimes feel a lack of motivation? Do you think being limited to one language helps? Also, do you think that being the "sole" curator helps? What does the selection process look like? Do you enjoy running WOTD? If you could change something about the process, what would it be, if anything? Vininn126 (talk) 11:06, 13 August 2026 (UTC)
From an outside perspective, it seems that users who very often take up dealing with FWOTD burn out very quickly. Is this true for you, and if so, why? What does the process for selecting a word look like?
- Most definitely true for me; despite appearing to be a simple mechanism, there are many steps involved for a term to go from submitted to featured. Before I left my mark, there was no process to track which terms were ready to be featured. Basically, when it was time to start scheduling words, one had to hope that the submissions met the basic requirements (generally, a single translated quote with some audio info) and often, they did not. Additionally, a surprising number of submissions are not obviously interesting; one needs to either dig deeper or directly ask the submitter.
- I have made improvements to the FWOTD process by splitting terms by whether they are ready to be featured or not. For the ones that are not ready, I created a template (Template:nomstub) to bring its status to the attention of our readers, hoping that they contribute enough to make the entry meet the minimum requirements. Surprisingly, I witnessed some of these entries improve due to this new practice! Additionally, from Hftf's insight, I started to inform the submitters when their nominated term got scheduled. On top of that, I began notifying our respective language communities a few days before one of their terms was about to be in the spotlight.
- Fundamentally, however, I believe the burden was more impactful for me because I am not a linguist; the mechanics and intricacies of foreign languages do not naturally catch my attention.
What is needed to help make this process more maintainable?
- Honestly, more people. This project alone is very time-consuming for one editor. If the labor were distributed by another handful of editors, FWOTD would be easily manageable.
I'd also like to know why you took up curating FWOTD. Do you find it enjoyable? Do you think it's worthwhile to continue?
- A few of us on Discord noticed that there was couple-day streak where no FWOTD were featured. After contacting the previous maintainer (who I very much appreciate the work they had done), they informed me they were no longer capable of handling the workload. I stepped up to take their place out of a sense of duty and some level of interest. But after a month of being "the guy", I became considerably exhausted (and not the kind of tired that sleep can fix); to a point that I had a take a small break from Wiktionary and reconsider my purpose here. I unfortunately cannot say that the work was enjoyable. I felt that I was working a second job and always against a deadline.
- Despite my rough experience, I think the project itself is worth continuing if (and only if!) the maintainers gain satisfaction or enjoyment from the work. Otherwise, I'd advocate to reduce its frequency.
What languages, language families would you like to see more often?
- Hot take: Constructed languages. They contain some very peculiar terms that are rarely (if not, never) found in a natural language. Take, for instance, mai'e. You would use this word when you ask a question and someone responds in a technically correct manner, but their answer does not satisfy your question. I'm sure we've all ran across this situation before and so, I think others would find it relatable.
Do things like focus weeks help in the process?
- Admittedly, my tenure was not long enough to consider focus weeks. I was just trying to keep my head above water. However, I think they are a cool idea, as it demonstrates how connected other languages are with each other.
@TranqyPoo It sounds like the problem is that there are too many nominations that aren't ready and that as a curator it's hard to make them ready. Would you say that's accurate? Vininn126 (talk) 11:24, 17 August 2026 (UTC)
From an outside perspective, it seems that users who very often take up dealing with FWOTD burn out very quickly. Is this true for you, and if so, why? And what is needed to help make this process more maintainable? What does the process for selecting a word look like?
- Yes, definitely, maintaining FWOTD can be exhausting. While we get a decent amount of nominations, only a small part of them are up to standards for featuring, that is, it fits the requirements laid out on the nomination page at the very least. This can be a source of stress, especially when you're scrambling to find an entry for the next day (or even for the current day, if there's still no FWOTD yet and you get that haunting "coming soon" notice on the main page). But this isn't it – I usually add a few more requirements as I select words and assign them to a date. I generally check for the entry's overall "health": it shouldn't have any outstanding requests (e.g.,
{{rfe}},{{rfclarify}}, and definitely not{{rfv}}or{{rfd}}, of course). We also want to have diversity in the languages that we feature. After all, we say we have coverage of over 5100 languages (as of the time of writing this blurb), so it’s not great if we keep recycling the most well-documented languages. This can sometimes be frustrating because nominations generally come from a small handful of languages that our editors focus on. Additionally, I usually try to think of ways of connecting entries to a particular day, so that an entry can be featured on a day that is somehow related to the entry. All these requirements piling on makes the process quite a beast to deal with, especially with the amount of time and effort spent (vs. the relatively low reward of getting a word featured for a day). Partly because of the burnout and partly because I saw that other editors were contributing, I went on a hiatus from around December 2025 until July 2026. - I must give my appreciation to TranqyPoo, who took a month or so (during my hiatus) to work out and test out some good workflow ideas. Some great ideas that came from him and I have now adopted (as I make my comeback >.<) include:
- Informing language-specific editors of upcoming FWOTD in their language: This gets the language-specific community more involved in the process and fill in the gaps where maintainers may be lacking.
- Pinging the nominator when setting FWOTDs: It’s a small but helpful gesture that gives recognition to the nominator, and oftentimes the recognition is reciprocated. I often get thanked for setting up FWOTD; feeling seen helps to make the hard work a little easier.
- Having a spreadsheet tracker to prevent languages being featured too often and keep track of the workflow. This has also helped me to have FWOTDs set up for a few more days in advance so that we don't run into the issue of having the "coming soon" notice come up.
- The
{{nomstub}}template: this is a great way of tracking nominated entries that still need some work before featuring. - Triaging the nominations by keeping ready-to-feature entries at WT:Foreign word of the day/Nominations/Schedule.
I'd also like to know why you took up curating FWOTD. Do you find it enjoyable? Do you think it's worthwhile to continue?
- I think I was first involved with FWOTD when Lingo Bingo Dingo would ask me to look through Chinese entries that were about to be featured or ask me to make entries ready for featuring. I started contributing more as a maintainer of FWOTD around March 2025 when Lingo Bingo Dingo had to step away from the role. As a maintainer of FWOTD, I found that the fun is in learning about the words and phrases that get nominated and the languages represented by the nominated entries. There was once when I dug quite deep into a rabbit hole on Guhu-Samane while trying to see if a word in this language would be good to feature – NGL the language’s history is a bit crazy (TL;DR according to Courtney Handman, the linguistic identity of speakers were largely shaped by a missionary and Bible translation efforts 😱)
- In my humble opinion, FWOTD is a really cool part of Wiktionary and definitely worth the trouble to continue, despite what I said before about burnout. From an outward facing perspective, I think it gives a chance for many interesting words and phrases and less-commonly-heard-of languages to be featured. Beyond the particular words and phrases that get featured, and even beyond the languages that get featured, FWOTD also really highlights the collaborative nature of wiki projects like Wiktionary. FWOTD is only possible with the help of the many volunteers who give their time and efforts “aim[ing] to describe all words of all languages”. For the Wiktionarian community, FWOTD has been a great way to beef up some of our entries. Because of our requirement for there to be quotations, citations, and/or pronunciation information before an entry is featured, this requires coordinated efforts to make sure we feature presentable, high-quality entries.
What languages, language families would you like to see more often?
- We definitely need more FWOTD nominations for words in languages outside of Indo-European and Sinitic. Particularly, I don't think we get a lot of coverage for Niger–Congo languages, Indigenous languages of the Americas, Tibeto–Burman languages, or Formosan languages, just to name a few. And signed languages are almost never featured (probably because Wiktionary just doesn't have good coverage of signed languages in general).
Do things like focus weeks help in the process?
- I personally haven't made much use of focus weeks. I think I've only ever set up one focus week (which will be coming up in December this year). I think it is good that once we've got a set, then there's a full week of content that we don't need to worry about. However, it's often tricky to get enough entries for a set because entries that are nominated for focus weeks are often not yet ready to be featured, or there are multiple entries nominated from the same language for the same focus week (but we try not to feature the same language within close proximity, definitely not within a week). I usually try to focus (no pun intended) on making entries work for special dates, which are easier to fulfil.
- Since you’re asking about what helps in the process (you did actually ask earlier, but it feels better to end off this back-and-forth with this rather than saying this earlier), I’ll take this as an opportunity to call for more help from the editors (if we are to maintain this as a feature of our site). Some ways to help:
- A few more regular maintainers would be great. This way, we can prevent burnout since the pressure isn’t on a single editor.
- Nominate entries that already meet the requirements. This keeps the pool of featurable nominations much more manageable.
- Help making nominations up to standards.
- Create entries / edit with FWOTD in mind. It’s kind of gamifying the system in a way because it’s fun to have your work featured.
- Add yourself to working groups relevant to you in Module:workgroup ping/data.
— justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 15:07, 21 August 2026 (UTC)
@Justinrleung @TranqyPoo Do you think that if the nominations page were better organized, e.g. ready entries separated from non-ready entries, that the task would be less daunting? Vininn126 (talk) 12:11, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
Yes, but this is no longer hypothetical. We are already doing this. See: WT:Foreign word of the day/Nominations/Schedule. When I created this, I was heavily inspired by WT:Word of the day/Nominations/Schedule. TranqyPoo 💬 ✏️ 12:20, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
@Justinrleung, @TranqyPoo Is there anything else you'd like to add? Something overlooked, forgotten from the above, for example. Vininn126 (talk) 11:35, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
Content-wise, I have nothing. However, you could ask the readers what they think would improve FWOTD. Perhaps one may have an idea we never thought of. TranqyPoo 💬 ✏️ 15:41, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
One thing I forgot to mention is that we also lack a variety of parts of speech among the FWOTDs. We are most often featuring nouns; this is understandable because nouns are open class, the most common category, and usually the easiest to conceptualize. It's sort of reflecting something that's probably inherent to language, the so-called "noun bias". So, as a suggestion for editors who are thinking about nominating entries, I think it would be best to try to intentionally work against this bias in our nominations and try nominating other parts of speech (or even better, entries that show a range of parts of speech for the same lemma). — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 16:27, 31 August 2026 (UTC)
Hello! We also have WOTD and FWOTD in French Wiktionary, and we have added recently the Thesaurus of the Day, after a monthly project to create the first lot. We carefully think about adding a third one, because of the amount of work needed for pick and writing each one. Our solution was 1. more people and 2. technical. The template that will switch every day would pick the selection for the exact day first, but if there is not, it will pick one for the same day a year before. That way, we are not in a hurry to be sure to have a new proposal, if we at least have a whole year filled. It is not as good as new to display one from a past year, but it is a way to reduce the charge and reuse the curation already done. I don't know if it is something that could work for you too! 
Noé 07:53, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
This reminds me. @ImenaOphelia What has your experience been like operating WOTD on pl.wiktionary? Do you ever find yourself burned out trying to set days? Are you glad it was introduced? Vininn126 (talk) 10:41, 26 August 2026 (UTC) @Noé Can you expand what "Thesaurus of the Day" is and what you mean by picking the first lot and third one? Introducing a system to recycle WOTD could be interesting, perhaps it could be expanded to say that this word was WOTD before, to show readers how the word has changed since then. @Justinrleung @TranqyPoo, what do you think? Vininn126 (talk) 10:44, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
Well, we had WOTD first, then FWOTD and our third section on the homepage to shed light on nice content of Wiktionary is Thesaurus of the Day. As there is 365 calls for template, we have to divide the year in four subpages, so the serie we started with was for July/August/September and we only activate the burb on the homepage when this list was completed. Then, future entries are still not added but we can go on and hope that it will be continued. Thesaurus of the Day is a list of ten words picked in a thesaurus, that could be in French or in another language (we may split it at some point in the future), plus a picture and a link to the thesaurus. This could work because thesauri in French Wiktionary are in general more developed than the ones in English Wiktionary. It is not only synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms but also related vocabulary such as people, places, actions, etc. It is quite difficult to elect 10 words for some thesauri but it could led to some edits in the thesaurus itself, so it is positive. Finally, I can say that we try to cover a large diversity of thematic and to include thesauri based on verbs and adjectives, as they are quite peculiar. As it is still a fresh new operation, I can't provide any feedback from the readers. Noé 12:22, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
The recycling/fallback idea was also brought up before by @Sgconlaw, and I think he uses it also for WOTD. See User talk:Polomo/2025#FWOTD for details. The idea sounds okay, though of course, it's not ideal that we refeature a word. I like the idea of somehow showing that something is a refeature. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 13:14, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
The carrier pigeon brings the news to the masses. If you would like to be interviewed, or want to suggest someone, say so on the talk page.
For a long time, I was only a frequent reader of Wikipedia and Wiktionary. Editing seemed like a very daunting task. Previously, I have only edited smaller, independent wikis, most relating to fandom, even running one for my group's collaborative worldbuilding project. During the lockdown, I created this account and begun editing the way many do, basic copyediting, fixing mistakes, trying to wriggle my way around. Though never felt too confident in my writing to try doing something from scratch. The real gateway was together with the guidance from friends of mine who graciously explained how Wikipedia worked and gave me the confidence to attempt more things.
Editing has brought a lot of joy to my life. The collaboration has connected me to the most wonderful people I have met. The collaboration and research skills that I have developed from wiki editing are also invaluable.
This dictionary is a project that does not work in theory but in practice. What a beautiful collection of thousands of mouth's and hand's work it is. How a project so large can be maintained by such a small number of editors is quite impressive.
- Our goal is the destruction of our purpose.
- Write more of your thoughts down.
- Be kinder to each other.
Hoping that the project becomes friendlier to bringing newer editors in.
So many to choose from! As one of the newer editors, I would enjoy to hear the side of those who have been editing for more than a decade.
This is the journal's satire column. Nothing below actually happened.
The Wiktionary community has always taken to heart its goal to document all words in all languages, whether big or small, alive or dead, attested or not. For this reason, many editors have always perceived discriminatory towards the future generations the impossibility of documenting the terms and languages that have yet to exist. In order to solve this situation, a vote was recently created to amend WT:RECONS and WT:NOT to allow the reconstruction namespace to describe how languages will evolve overtime, the various pidgins and creoles that will arise with the global spread of English as a lingua franca, and all the slang that will arise in reference to historical and political events we can easily predict. By analogy to how proto-languages document the first reconstructable stages of a given language family, eschato-languages will allow us through comparative evidence to predict how the last survivor of that given family will sound like the moment before it meets its demise.
The vote passed 28-0-3 and was closed within the first week per w:WP:SNOWBALL to allow the community to get to work as soon as possible. Follow two of the supporting votes:
Strong support. The project in its current state only allows you to be stuck in the past, and never in anyone's life will we need to communicate in Ugaritic with anyone. If we care about Wiktionary's usefulness, we should rather prepare our readers to the future. As technology progresses, the jobs left available to humans keep changing, and we should be one step ahead by already knowing all the technical jargon of the professions that we will soon be forced to work as. Wikipedia already has pages for events that have yet to happen, and really I see no reason why we should not do the same. PengWin2 (talk) 16:32, 25 August 2026 (UTC)
Support. We have proto-languages, why not protologisms? Using the reconstructed namespace for anything and everything proto- just makes sense. Winnin125 (talk) 21:37, 21, August 2026 (UTC)
Every good change always comes with its complications however, and not everyone is as enthusiastic about the vote as it is worded.
Abstain. I'm not against the idea behind the change, but I'm not entirely convinced about the solution provided. The reconstruction namespace is much too hidden away for casual readers to ever stumble upon. In my opinion, the best approach here would be to document these terms in the mainspace alongside all the already existing ones, while increasing the minimum duration of an RFV thread from one month to at least 10 years, in which the term can actually come into use and be attested. TooPranky (talk) 16:32, 25 August 2026 (UTC)
You guys may be aware of this year's Word of the Year project. I thought it would be interesting to take a micro view, looking over an entire month (e pico) using Wiktionary's own page view data.
Something that proved to be a major challenge in isolating genuine trends is the phenomenon that many Wiktionary pages tend to randomly get titanic amounts of views for no apparent reason. I had already known about the bizarre case of Category:Pages using catfix, which several months after its creation inexplicably saw its views surge to tens of millions per month. The peak of this mad rush came on 3 November 2025, when pageviews.wmcloud.org records 1,708,927 views in a single day. I created a Phabricator ticket later that month which highlighted the anomaly, but answers from the site engineers have not been forthcoming.
In the end, I've resolved to take the less-than-scientific approach of obtaining plenty of candidate entries inspecting the view graphs to find ones which align with a real-world trend. Thus, bbq spiking for exactly two days ([1]) can be safely dismissed as bad data, or someone's bot gone haywire. Even though pageviews.wmcloud.org claims to separate "User", "Spider", and "Automated" views, the fact that they all spike in sync redounds to the dubiousness of the data. In fact, even a very short-lived trend graph never crashes by 100%, because there will always be people who are a couple days late to the trend. Thus a plausible page view graph associated with a short-term trend will suddenly spike, then smoothly decline over several days. A longer-term trending word might rise over a period of weeks and gradually decline over a few months.
Nevertheless, the simple approach of using the top-1000 pageview API as a starting point proved effective for finding candidates. A quick script assembles rankings for June and July 2026 and "diffs" them to find words which moved up that month, or entered the top 1000 for the first time.
I also vibe coded several scripts to find good candidates using more exhaustive and rigorous methods, but I was mostly dissatisfied with the results. The exception was one where I specifically instructed Claude to search recently-created pages. The script checks every page created in the last 60 days (at the time of analysis, between 7 June 2026 and 5 August 2026) to find the total views of each one and rank the top results. Ultimately, the script took over 7 hours to get through 103242 pages.
Although I don't think it will possible to obviate the need for manual verification, I welcome suggestions for possible techniques to make the whole process more effective.
A few words saw spikes after being featured by Wordle, including maven (2 July 2026) and pshaw (15 July 2026). These are not that exciting, given that Wordle has a new word every day, but provide some comfort that Wiktionary page view data really matches up with reality every now and then.
Words related to the film The Odyssey rose dramatically in conjunction with its theatrical release on the 17th of July. Quelle surprise: entries like Odyssey, Odysseus, and Ὀδυσσεύς (Odusseús) have been swept up. But here's the nicher πολύτροπος (polútropos), a term used to describe Odysseus as being a man "of many turns". There is also ἄρκτος (árktos) which spikes on the 24th, but unless it actually relates to the film (which I haven't seen btw) it's likely a result of a data anomaly. Out of this category, the winner is surprisingly Homeric laughter, which has reaped over 7000 views since the film came out.
Some terms seem to have been propelled by a hit tweet: bioessentialism after [2] and the newly-created goyloop after [3]. The latter was quickly sent to RFV and it remains to be seen whether it will actually maintain its use.
A few humorous World Cup terms cropped up too: Penaldo, the Mbappé special, and the French term footix.
Lookups for póg mo thóin rose briefly after the Irish insult was used by one of the women in the reality show Love Island ([4]). The brunette sitting across from her doesn't understand Irish and is unfazed even after the nearby jock looking guy explains that it means "kiss my ass".
Several newly-created pages have gotten off to a strong start in terms of views. This group mostly consists of strange Internet terms like anamaxx, jartycuck, honfident, and everystein singleberg timeowitz, all of which are best avoided in polite company.
The symbol of the month for September 2026 is: ♿
Fifty-seven years ago this month (for the mathematically illiterate like myself, September 1969), this iconic icon of a stick figure sat upon a wheelchair was selected by the disability advocacy group Rehabilitation International to be the International Symbol of Access, used to denote places that are accessible to people with disabilities. It was designed—originally headless—by the Danish design student Susanne Koefoed from the Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design; she presented her pictogram to the group in July 1968. Rehabilitation International added a head to humanise the symbol before its final selection.
The wheelchair icon, frequently appearing on a blue background to make it more easily recognisable, immediately took off and is today used all over the world. Indeed, in 1974, only five years after its selection, it was formally endorsed by the United Nations (famously the most influential of all the organisations whose law everyone always follows) and the United States Department of Transportation. Its already global status was perhaps cemented in 1980 upon its inclusion in ISO 7001—a set of universal pictograms and symbols for public information by the International Organization for Standardization.
Minor variations of this symbol also exist, with the most common redesigns attempting to make the person on the wheelchair appear less rigid and stiff. For instance, one 1994 redesign by Brendán Murphy depicts a slightly more humanised stick figure using their arms to move their wheelchair, and themselves, forward, demonstrating independence. Other proposals have been made to replace the wheelchair icon all together with an abstract design that does not display (unintentionally favour) any specific disability. While some people (including those with disabilities) support these redesigns, the ancient adage (actually coined around 1962) "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" has also been applied by critics who argue that the International Symbol of Access is far too iconic and globally recognisable to require altering.
Did you know you can see changes made to a singular language? For example, if you wish to see changes made to Swedish entries, you can type Category:Swedish lemmas in the search bar and click "Recent changes" from there!
I endlessly edit, tired, with no rest
Making new entries, I hope, only the best;
To turn red into blue for our readers' gain,
Yet there's so much to do, I may go insane.
Great Work Everyone
I was reading Actualités for a while when it first came out, so it's neat to see Wiktionary do something similar, but with a distinct flavour. I especially enjoyed the trending words, the satire column, and the tip of the month (which I did not know!). It's also great to get to know my fellow editors a little better. I don't have a lot of free time in which to edit in general, but I am in principle open to contributing to a future issue. Hopefully this is something we can keep up in order to build the community here. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:49, 31 August 2026 (UTC)
Soo fun! (/pos /nsx)
I’m surprised that our renowned satirist LunaEatsTuna didn’t author the satire piece; it’s great – congrats to Vininn and Catonif. And did Juwan interview themself? will they interview future interviewees? — Polomo ⟨ oi! ⟩ · 18:20, 31 August 2026 (UTC)
The future of FWOTD
Congrats, all! I have publicized the journal on Bluesky. How often is the journal planned to be published?
On the future of FWOTD, I wonder if it would be feasible to gather a group of editors, each of whom would focus on a language group (Afroasiatic, Germanic, Sinitic, etc.) or a number of such groups. This might help to overcome the issue of FWOTD setters not being familiar with the languages they are working with. — Sgconlaw (talk) 20:03, 31 August 2026 (UTC)
Congrats!
Congratulations to all the ten wiktionarians who participated to this first issue! It is a pleasure to see such a good content. It may have been inspired by existing media, but have its own identity with unique contents! In 136 issues, Actualités du Wiktionnaire never had poetry! Satires are also only for April Fools and we haven’t succeed to have interviews so far! Pictogram of the month is also a great original and interesting idea! Hope you the best, for participants and readers!
Noé 08:35, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
Bravo!
Congrats for this first issue! It is so cool to see a new wiki-periodical :) Wishing you the best for the future issues! Danÿa (talk) 11:06, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
Meh
3/10 for the first issue. Interview could go deeper, satire should be funny, Traffic report is dull, and this comment is rudely negative —User:Vealhurl (talk 20:24, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
Hello from The Signpost! Hello, I was just looking through a draft for The Signpost and saw a mention of this new project. I'll make sure to keep an eye on this publication for any major updates, and would greatly appreciate it if you leave a suggestion of topics to cover. Where I do cover a Wiktionary topic, I will make sure to link to the relevant issue of The Headword where applicable, where Signpost readers can get more information on the topic, from those more engaged in this part of the Wikimedia Community than I am. Thanks for creating such a high quality community journal! Mitchsavl (talk) 10:30, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
Nice Just like Juwan, I also discovered the Actualités during Wikimania Paris, and it's very nice to see an English counterpart as well :] Congrats! PeaceSeekers (talk) 12:06, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
Wonderful idea, wonderful execution! I completely agree that Wiktionary needs more culture, and the articles in this issue are really fun and contribute well to that goal :D Obonyxiam (talk) 15:42, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
Great First Issue Loved the wholesome and down-to-earth interview, the genuinely funny satire piece, and details on just how arduous WOTDs are to curate. Personally I usually have too many words of my own that I'm wanting to research to take time on English WOTDs, but having a FWOTD is always entertaining not only on a cultural level but simply useful level too-- I don't think it should be left on the sidelines. One minor complaint, it was a bit of a whiplash reading "The Future of English?" subsection with just two sentences covering... four offensive imageboard neologisms. Not exactly surprised to hear those were the most popular new words published, but also if I'm going to be subjected to reading those words, a bit more... warning? might be nice. Other than that it was a solid section IMO and nice to see coverage of trends. Smartestpuppy (talk) 02:08, 14 September 2026 (UTC)