Jump to content

Wiktionary:The Headword/Issue 2

Add links
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
The HeadwordIssue 2 ⸺ 1 October 2026

The Headword is the English Wiktionary's periodical: a place where editors can voice their thoughts, announce their accomplishments, and make silly creations. It was founded in 2026 on the initiative of editors who believe Wiktionary has plenty of lexicography yet very little shared culture. We are inspired by the French Wiktionary's Actualités, running since 2015, as well as other Wikimedia community publications. Reach us through email, or just leave a message in Wiktionary talk:The Headword. (ISSN: 2979-3955)

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!

In this issue
Recent changes
Lemma counts
Word of the day
Foreign word of the day
Statistics report
  • Between August and September 2026, the project has seen the following changes:
    • +104626 new entries, +140 new languages. In total, 10239594 entries across 5250 different languages, corresponding to around 64% of all registered language codes.
    • +2493 lemma entries in English, for a total of 716123 entries.
    • After English, the languages with the biggest entry additions are Chinese (+936), Arabic (+624), Spanish (+615), and Dna'ina (+490).
Opinion  its own page
In an IDeal world
Authored on 15 September 2026 by Ioaxxere (talk)
An identification wristband
All our entries should have one.

Scottish researcher Dr. Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle has had a long career working in software development, and more recently in the study of the Celtic languages. His most recent project is Bunadas, a project aiming to catalogue etymologically related words across Celtic languages. It also has decent coverage across certain PIE languages, enough to create pretty, albeit limited, descendant trees for the sugar family or the cow family. Such projects are fairly commonplace within the linguistics world. But what should make us pay attention is its relationship to Wiktionary, which it leans on surprisingly heavily. Wiktionary links and icons are scattered liberally, many entries explicitly cite Wiktionary as a reference (heresy!), and, most significantly, its about page literally describes Wiktionary as the "biggest source of new material" — including lifting our entire coverage of Proto-Indo-European roots, Proto-Celtic, and the Brythonic languages.

And yet it appears that all this good, free and open Wiktionary data was far from simple to work with. Dr. Ó Donnaíle, writing in 2025, diagnoses us with an acute malady:

The problem is that even though the etymological information contained in Wiktionary is generally very good and is improving by the week, the way it is structured is dire. Wiktionary does not give unique IDs to words, so links between words are based on spelling and can be broken if the spelling is changed. Wiktionary does not distinguish properly between homographs. It piles all the homographs, both between languages and within languages, onto the one webpage. Wiktionary currently says, for example, that English bole 'tree trunk' is from Norse bolr, and that bolr is from PIE bʰel-, but it does not clarify which of the four different PIE roots bʰel- it means: the link just leads to the four of them.

Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle (2025)

User:Catonif kindly shared the example above on Discord (link), but this is not what inspired this article. I'm showing this case study and opinion because I already agree with it. Here is my attempt at getting you to agree as well.

Tip: to use IDs more easily, enable the ShowIDs gadget in your Special:Preferences, which shows all the IDs on a page!

The first reason IDs are quite useful is their ability to create highly targeted links. An English learner learning about the idiom tip the scale may be curious to know where it comes from, since it seems to have little to do with fish scales. Yet clicking on scale forces you to scroll past dozens of irrelevant senses prior to reaching the one being referred to. As with Dr. Ó Donnaíle's tree trunks, they may never be sure of the right point. Here's a targeted senseid link: scale ({{l|en|scale|id=measuring device}}). Try clicking or hovering over it (to get the preview) and consider how fluid it feels to be whisked directly to your destination. Although admittedly very few pages are as complex as "scale", multiplying this change over the millions of links across Wiktionary results in a far smoother and more pleasant experience for users. This is also much better than linking to a particular section number like Noun_3, which could change at any moment if the entry got superficially rearranged.

The second reason is that good data is virtuous for its own sake. The analogy is to that of one of the North American railway towns, to wit: a new development in an utterly barren area can suddenly turn the whole place into prime real estate, as everyone rushes to board the hurtling locomotive of human knowledge. An animal analogy featuring a watering hole in the desert or an artificial reef in the ocean is also apt, and researchers do have a bit of a fruitfly-like attraction to nutritious datasets. But more concretely, I can say confidently that any cool project involving big-data lexicography — whether it be massive etymology or descendant trees, or a semantic web — is impossible if you can't tell apart homographs, and trivial when you can.

So far I've been vague over how IDs should actually be implemented in the dictionary. We currently have IDs referring to a sense (senseids) and IDs referring to an etymology section (etymids or etymonids). The OED Online does the same thing, only with the unfortunate property of the IDs always being a meaningless series of numbers. On Wiktionary, sense IDs are created using the {{senseid}} ({{sid}} for short) template, as {{sid|en|example}}, and should be placed right on the sense line. Etymology IDs are created using {{etymid}} (now mostly deprecated) or {{etymon}}, as {{etymon|en|id=example}}. Etymology IDs are of course placed right in the etymology section. These create an ID in the HTML content of the page itself, which can be linked to like this: scale#English: measuring device (the ID is measuring device). Since both sense and etymology IDs produce the exact same result, and are distinguished merely by convention, it is important to not duplicate any IDs across a single page within a language. That way, a link always unambiguously refers to a single location on the page. Since the ID link includes the language, it is totally OK if different languages use the same ID on a page. In fact, editors may find this highly convenient when working with multiple languages at the same time.

Both kinds of IDs are useful in different contexts. When I am writing or speaking, like in this sentence, I am using words for their meaning only; if I were to link one of them inline, it should be to a senseid. On the other hand, etymology IDs encompass every sense within that etymology section. You should always use them when linking to a term's descendant or derived term X, because every single sense of X is part of the descendant tree, rather than just a single particular usage.

This gets tricky when an etymology section only contains a single sense. Although there is no point in being pedantic about sense versus etymology IDs at this current stage, a test you can consider is to imagine the term gaining a new slangy sense with some ridiculous meaning (for a dead language, imagine ancient stone tablets have been unearthed). Would it make sense for this new sense to appear as part of the link preview? This is why linking to the ancestor of a term can be either to a senseid or an etymology ID. It's situational, because in some cases only a single sense was brought over, and in other cases the entire family of usages of the term is maintained.

I'm not optimistic that the enormous task of ID-ifying Wiktionary is possible in its totality, inasmuch as Wiktionary can ever be "completed". Nevertheless, rigging up individual entries to be fully IDed is something I've been trying out recently on such pages as hyperauthorship and philosophoid (I'm intentionally linking the whole English entry here! No ID is necessary). It is surprisingly difficult, as I might need to edit half a dozen other pages just to get the IDs set up. Nonetheless, it feels rewarding to know that these efforts yielded better entries than I would have published otherwise.

One of the main reasons I feel fairly bearish about IDs in general is that many people seem to have issues coming up with decent names. I'm reminded of the old programming adage which teaches us how "there are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." By Wiktionary's design, IDs are meant to be human-readable, and are often presented to the user in the form of categories. The commonly used Wikidata IDs starting with Q look meaningless, but can easily be converted to a human-readable form through the Wikidata description. Unfortunately, many editors tend to add poor IDs such as "noun" or "suf" which fail to identify the actual sense or etymology section and distinguish it from current or future alternatives. If you have an entry -foo with one etymology section IDed as "suffix", you are setting yourself up for disaster (as far as "suboptimal ID" can really be considered disastrous) because a future etymology section is overwhelmingly likely to also be a suffix. Thus, my recommendation is for a senseid to be a highly abridged paraphrase or synonym of the definition, and an etymology ID can either be something which encompasses a few of the main senses or makes a reference to etymologically related terms. Keep in mind that the sense and etymology IDs must be different to prevent duplication within a language section. Editors creating duplicate IDs is a relatively common issue, which, as mentioned earlier, causes problems when trying to unambiguously target one or the other.

Ultimately, I acknowledge that etymon IDs are fairly difficult to come up with effectively and that the priority for them is relatively low given that the vast majority of entries have a single etymology section. Interestingly enough, LLMs seem ideally suited for this, utilizing their aptitude for crunching up context and generating output within the right portion of latent space (semantic space).

I'm not expecting anyone to read this and become an "ID absolutist"; yet there is a set of norms which I would like the community to adopt in order to reach towards the structured IDeal.

  1. Link to an ID if one is already available.
  2. Always create and use etymology IDs in cases where an entry has multiple etymology sections.
  3. Add lots of sense IDs in cases where a term has several specialized senses.
  4. Never create duplicate IDs within a language section (all sense and etymology IDs must be different).

If you've read this far, I feel hopeful that Wiktionary will transition to a more organized, convenient, and scientifically valuable state in the near future.

The Lexicographer  its own page
Interview with Justinrleung
Our interviewee

User:Justinrleung answers. If you would like to be interviewed, or want to suggest someone, say so on the talk page.

Can you introduce yourself?

Justinrleung here! I usually go by Justin, my given name. The rest of my username contains my middle initial R. and my surname Leung. I am a Canadian-born Chinese based in the Greater Toronto Area. I am an admin here on English Wiktionary, where I mainly work on Chinese and occasionally minority languages in China. I have been a Wiktionarian since 2013, which is almost 13 years ago :gasp: I have also been maintaining Foreign Word of the Day for a little while, as you may have learned from the first issue of The Headword.

How did you get into the Wikimedia movement?

As a kid, I was an avid reader of Wikipedia articles since Wikipedia would usually show up as the first search result on Google. I started editing with an account during high school, where I would make edits to articles on languages, Chinese history and culture, and Christianity. Around the same time, I stumbled upon Wiktionary since many Wikipedia articles would link to Wiktionary. My early edits were adding Cantonese, Mandarin, and Hokkien translations on English entries. I became more involved when I became whitelisted here, seeing that my edits were noticed and recognized, and the rest is history. I found the Wiktionary community a bit friendlier and less bureaucratic than Wikipedia, since it is smaller and less fragmented. As a not-so-great writer at the beginning of my Wikimedian journey, I also found the rigid format of Wiktionary easier to work with.

Other than Wiktionary and Wikipedia, I have also been involved in other sister projects, such as Wikisource, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and LinguaLibre. This branching out is closely related to what I do on Wiktionary. Wikisource is a great way to have things digitized, which can feed into our citations. Wikidata allows for structured data and connections across Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Commons is where our image and audio files are hosted; among other files, I've contributed to the CJK stroke order project and the Ancient Chinese characters project. LinguaLibre, of course, allows us to have more audio recordings for our entries. I really enjoy contributing to Wikimedia projects because I love being able to share knowledge freely to the world.

Which part of your contributions are you especially proud of?

The Chinese dialectal synonyms tables would be on the top of my list. While the initial conception of the {{zh-dial}} template was very much @Wyang's, there were a few parts of the template's functionality that came about from my input. One of these parts is the dialectal map. It really arose from a little personal project that I was doing on a Facebook page I used to maintain, where I was using our Wiktionary data to create dialectal maps manually. With the help of @Wyang and @Fish bowl, we eventually made really high quality dialectal maps that translate our huge tables into something visually much more useable. I'm really glad that these dialectal synonyms tables and maps have eventually led to extension into other languages with the templates {{dial syn}} and {{dialect map}}, whose functionalities actually far exceed the {{zh-dial}} template. These tables have really allowed us to have a much better coverage of Chinese topolectal terms. I think the best part of contributing to these dialectal synonyms tables is the friends I got to make along the way. Other than fellow Wiktionarians who have also been contributing to these tables, I have also been connected to some Discord servers with some Wiktionary readers who regularly visit the site to check our tables.

What would you like to see change on Wiki?

One thing I think we should improve on is how we recognize each other's work. I like using the "thank" function a lot, but I feel like we should do a little more, something more permanent and public, to recognize significant contributions, perhaps something like a barnstar.

What are your interests outside Wiki?

In real life, I'm pursuing a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My research has mainly focused on the morphosyntax and sociolinguistics of (heritage) Cantonese, with my disseration focusing on classifier constructions in Toronto and Hong Kong Cantonese. In my research career so far, I've also been able to be involved in research on a few languages that I might not have thought of encountering at all, including Old/Middle French, Lingala, and White Hmong.

I also enjoy listening to Taiwanese pop. I encountered Taiwanese during my time I went to Taiwanese Mandarin school on Saturdays, and I got hooked on Taiwanese since high school. Taiwanese pop songs were a great way for me to learn new vocabulary, and this brought me back to Wiktionary to improve upon our Taiwanese/Hokkien coverage. I also occasionally contribute to a Facebook group curating lyrics of Taiwanese/Hokkien pop songs, which was recently made into a searchable database.

Recently, I've also been helping out with CantoCaptions, which is a project curating subtitles of Cantonese shows and movies in written Cantonese. This has got me thinking a lot more about Cantonese sentence-final particles, which, to be honest, we aren't the best at documenting.

As a Christian, I am also quite involved in my church. I have been serving as a pianist since high school, and I've also helped with leading fellowship programs for young adults and teaching Sunday school. My faith in Christ and church community have really supported me in my growth as a person, helping me through the ebbs and flows of life and giving me meaning and purpose.

Do you have a specific message to send to our readers?

First of all, if you're still reading this interview, thank you! Wiktionarians, I don't get a lot of chances to say this, so I'll say it here. You're a great bunch! Honestly, Wiktionary is a hidden gem, and our work doesn't get enough attention, so good on you on striving towards our vision of documenting every word of every language.

If you're a Wiktionary lurker thinking about contributing in any way to this project, just do it! It might feel intimidating at first, but you can start with smaller things. As you do more, you'll get used to it, and I'm sure there will be other editors along the way to help you if you have questions.

Which editor would you like to see interviewed next?

I don't have a specific name in mind, but perhaps an editor who is involved in the more technical side of things (templates, modules, and/or bots) or one who works on the documentation of low-resource languages.

Thanks for having me!

The Vandal  its own page
WT:BOLD to be replaced with WT:ITALIC
Authored on 13 September 2026 by Vininn126 (talk)
The Vandal

This is the journal's satire column. Nothing below actually happened.

A woman posing with her arms raised to the air. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is not present in the background.
A woman embracing the new leaning policy near The Leaning Tower of Pisa

WMF has announced that they are lifting WT:BOLD and replacing it with WT:ITALIC. Effective immediately, all people editing will have to lean, working while slanted. The reasoning? It supposedly will help with editors' health. The claim is that editors sit too much while editing and have bad posture, damaging their spine. By forcing them to take a slanted position, they fix their posture, and prevent back problems for all of them.

There was much pushback, as editors want to feel comfortable, but this policy was pushed through. Incidentally, sales on kneeling chairs have seen an increase.

There was further confusion, as many editors decided to buy Italian flags, grow mustaches, and eat spaghetti with every meal. WMF apologized for the confusion caused by the new name, saying they never wanted to reinforce stereotypes, but has decided to not change the name.

In spirit of both, some editors decided to go to The Leaning Tower of Pisa while editing. WMF has said nothing on this.

Symbol of the month  its own page
The International Symbol of Parking
Authored on 29 September 2026 by LunaEatsTuna (talk)
A capital letter P on a blue background
The symbol of the month for October 2026, 🅿

Our inaugural symbol of the month in the previous issue was the iconic International Symbol of Access: this month's symbol follows the trend of signage depicting white pictograms on a blue background, only this time, the symbol is just a single letter. The parking sign is iconic, used globally (including in countries that do not have English as an official language) despite not only being a letter of the Latin alphabet, but also seemingly an abbreviation of an English word. So, how did we get here? Surprisingly, the answer is not colonialism. Road signage began appearing across Europe and the United States at the beginning of the 1900s (the decade, not the century) as automobiles started to become more common. Many road signs depicting abstract concepts—pictograms—were created during this period, with the purpose of making these signs easier to recognise at a quick glance if travelling at an elevated speed, as opposed to being a lengthy paragraph of text.

Originally, early parking signs in places like the United Kingdom simply had the command or instruction written out in full, such as "no parking". However, as early as 27 April 1927, the Switzerland-based Union of Swiss Cities was working on its own national signage, including their proposed symbol for parking: a blue disc surrounding a white P (🅟). While not explained in their original proposal (which was written in French), all three words for parking (the action) or the verb to park in each of the official languages of Switzerland at this time began with a p: French parcage, German parken and Italian posteggio (Romansh was only recognised as a national language of Switzerland in 1938). Also worth noting: today, parcage and posteggio are no longer the most common words for car parking in either language.

At the same time, the League of Nations' Committee on Road Traffic was aiming to standardise road signage across Europe. The Union of Swiss Cities would go on to collaborate with this Committee in the Committee's fifth session, which concluded on 26 November 1927—and upon its recommendation by the director of the Union of Swiss Cities, M. G. de Schulthess—several signs, including the Union's blue disc containing a white P, were selected by the Committee to be adopted as the first-ever universal road signs. The report was published in French and English (both lingua francas); it may thus also have helped that P works as the abbreviation for the English parking.

The committee was successful, being swiftly adopted and standardising much of the road signage in use in Europe at the time. An early use of the symbol came during the 1928 Summer Olympics held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, between 28 July and 12 August 1928, when it appeared on parking permits issued to certain officials and delegates by the event organisers. This is also very early evidence of its use outside of a sign to indicate a parking place, rather representing the concept of parking itself. The first use of the symbol in print as a character (appearing as Ⓟ, in black) is in the 1930 pamphlet On the Road by the United Kingdom's National "Safety First" Association, published in London. Ⓟ appears beside British location names to indicate whether or not they have public parking spaces available.

A parking sign in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
Traffic report  its own page
Traffic report
Authored on 29 September 2026 by Ioaxxere (talk)
Traffic report

What people are looking at.

A tilcayo, which looks like a large cat with leopard-like spots, walking on a platform at a wildlife refuge
Tigrino, a tilcayo (Leopardus tilcayo) at La Senda Verde, a wildlife refuge in Bolivia.

Welcome to the second Wiktionary traffic report! A lot has happened since the last traffic report, written almost two months ago. Following issues will probably keep up a consistent schedule of collecting data near the end of every month. Thus, this one is likely to be the exception to discuss the entire period from August 5 to September 27.

Starting positively, a small new species of wild cat was formally described this month, the tilcayo. Local villagers had already been calling them as such for generations, unaware that they represented an entirely distinct species within the cat family. Thus, this was adopted as the scientific name Leopardus tilcayo. The origin of the name is uncertain, but it may be from the phrase meaning “tiny foot” in Aymara.

The slang term burger music seems to be trending in 2026, with Google Trends data implying a significant increase in popularity since July 2025. Originally I thought was that it might be derived from the terminally online usage of calling Americans burgers (see burger, noun sense 5). However, it actually originates from Detroit hip-hop slang, and refers to any kind of uncool, generic music, with the term having a similar vibe to coworker music. Pitchfork magazine documents burger as a derogatory adjective used in Detroit, stating that:

There's no exact origin for the phrase. "Burger" and its sibling "ham"(burger) were big insults in Detroit around the turn of the decade; BabyTron has on multiple occasions said, "Yo boyfriend a burger." The newest iteration appears to have been popularized by Twitch streamers Prince Cassell and Macc Danny, who use "burger" as a synonym for a musician who's goofy but acts like they're doing something impressive or edgy.

Unfortunately, the significant proportion of viral events in the last month however are related to U.S. politics (I am not American). Hopefully, next month's trends will be a bit more lighthearted. But don't count on it!

Warning Lexicographical disclaimer
The terms below are likely to be extremely controversial or offensive. As we will see, outrage drives clicks.

This first trend requires a little bit of backstory for those unfamiliar with U.S. (and to some extent broader Anglosphere) politics. After the beginning of Trump's second term in January 2025, the U.S. entered a unique new period of opposition to socially liberal policies or "woke ideology". Liberal commentators have been discussing the early-2020s era of wokeness and how it led to the Democrats' electoral defeat in 2024. Throughout early 2026, the appellation Woke 1.0 began picking up steam online, with the term carrying the implication that Democrats ought to learn from this era and re-package socially liberal policies in a new form. The entry appeared on Wiktionary in June 2026, citing social media posts from a month prior.

The exact boundaries of Woke 1.0 varies across commentators; the consensus seems to be that it started in 2014, which Wikipedia highlights as the popularization of the phrase and hashtag stay woke by the activist movement Black Lives Matter. That year also happens to be the beginning of the social justice warrior era, as can be seen by data from Google Trends and Ngram Viewer. The 2024 election of Trump is universally agreed upon as the end date, as even before he took office, his opponents had already been demoralized by the Trump's strong performance at the polls: the Republicans had achieved a government trifecta (president, majority in the Senate, majority in the House of Representatives).

Woke 1.0 is often used in a derogatory way, with commentators claiming that wokeness was applied in an overzealous way, leading to a popular backlash. This made it all the more surprising when progressive politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared to denounce Woke 1.0 in an August 10 interview, quoting New York City Council member Chi Ossé who had tweeted in May 2026 that "Woke 1 was crazyyyy". As op-ed writers began furiously typing up their hot takes, page views on the Woke 1.0 entry spiked by a factor of ten, reaching a respectable 1538 views in the month of August. Ultimately, this term is unlikely to retain staying power: the period it refers to will recede into the past, and it is unlikely to become an academic historical term.

However, this entry's performance pales in comparison to that of Charlie Kirk-related entries: after the assassination of the American conversative political commentator on September 10, 2025, the response was sharply polarized across the political spectrum. The Republican administration aimed to protect his legacy, going as far as to proclaim a National Day of Remembrance and to crack down on individuals thought to be "praising, rationalizing, or making light of Kirk's death". On the other hand, progressives who disagreed with his activism mocked him after his death, creating the kirkification meme, in which his face is inserted via AI into unexpected contexts. Despite the shooting being over a full year ago, Kirk appears to have retained a strong presence in the American consciousness. On September 10, 2026, many social media users participated in the Kirkiversary, a celebration of the one-year anniversary of his killing. There were a few in-person gatherings as well, with some baking a cake for the occasion.

In regard to Wiktionary, the quantity and concentration of the page views was unprecedented: Kirkiversary was viewed 4175 times on September 10, and 5770 times on the 11th—despite it only being created on the 9th. The slightly dodgy spelling variant Kirkaversary was viewed 3753 times and 3720 times on those days, respectively. The "OG" entry kirkification remained the top performer, garnering 14334 and 7892 views respectively, having maintained a rate of hundreds of views per day for months (data). Other entries created in 2025 which saw a spike include lowkirkuinely (2067 and 1249 views) and Charlie Kirk (meaning “to assassinate”, with 1913 and 478 views).

Other recently coined terms relating to Kirk include Kirkmas and kirkentine, with the idea of incorporating Christmas and Valentine's Day elements alongside the Kirkiversary. The term pre-Kirk posits that his assassination triggered a paradigm shift in politics; the entry was created very recently, although the term has been around for at least a few months.

On August 7, 2026, U.S. president Trump used the term becocked in an interview, causing an enormous spike in lookups for the word. Funnily enough, the last notable usage of the term was also by Trump, in a campaign speech from May 1, 2024. The confusion surrounding his use of the word seems to be much more limited this time around, possibly resulting from the creation of the comprehensive Wiktionary entry for it soon after the 2024 speech. Nevertheless, a HuffPost article manages to deliver the false claim that "becocked" only seems to have been around since May 2024, while linking to and referencing the Wiktionary entry which highlights quotations from 1976, 1984, and 1996 under the same sense.

The final U.S. politics–related topic for this article is the controversy on the naming of Lake America. Following up on Gulf of America, the U.S. president signed an executive order on August 27, 2026 changing the name of Lake Ontario, a body of water straddling the Canada–U.S. border. The entry was created immediately after, yet further research uncovered the inconvenient fact that there already exists a Lake America in Mississippi. The term is likely an older name for Lake Sardis, used in some books from the 19th century.

The term race realist saw a spike in lookups during August 2026 as a result of its association with American philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who gained notoriety after bringing the allegations of plagiarism regarding British academic Jason Arday to light in July 2026. Cofnas identifies himself as a "race realist" and believes that IQ differences across racial groups (particularly that between those of European and Sub-Saharan African ancestry) are a result of genetic differences, contradicting the scientific consensus which attributes group disparities to societal and environmental factors. On August 20, 2026, he was suspended from his position at Ghent University for reasons related to the Arday scandal. Consequently, two competing open letters appeared. One opposed his suspension, claiming that he was "being punished for exercising his academic freedom", while the other condemned his ideas, which it described as "racist and white supremacist".

Finally, various derivations of the incel slang term foid (“a woman”) have been popularized recently. The entries for foidlet, foyim, philosofoid, and vocafoid were all created very recently, although none are truly new coinages. These terms are used by incels to criticize, albeit through overt misogyny, women for supposedly partaking in hypergamy (dating someone more attractive or successful than them) at the expense of unattractive men.

Citations  its own page
Citations
Authored on 25 September 2026 by Sgconlaw (talk)
Citations

References to Wiktionary by others.

Illuminated manuscript of a medieval scribe writing a copy of another codex.
An illustration of a scribe copying a document, from L’Estoire del Saint Graal (The History of the Holy Grail, c. 1300 – c. 1315), an illuminated manuscript in the collection of the British Library.
Assistant Professor Włodzimierz Lewoniewski of the Department of Information Systems, Poznań University of Economics and Business, has created a video presenting the development of Wiktionary from 2002 to 2026:

The video features a bar chart race, illustrating year-by-year changes in the number of entries across more than 100 Wiktionary language editions. Each bar represents a single language version, with rankings shifting over time as different communities expand at varying rates. The video highlights the scale and dynamics of one of the world’s largest multilingual dictionary projects developed through open collaboration.

Włodzimierz Lewoniewski, “Wiktionary Growth Timeline (2002–2026): A Chronicle of Milestones”, Lewoniewski.info (8 February 2026; archived)
Linguist Danny Bate has written about getting started on etymology:

In terms of free online resources, I personally swear by Wiktionary, the lexicographical counterpart to Wikipedia. It’s an endless maze of pages and clickable links, and many of its entries include etymological information.

Danny Bate, “How to Be a Word Detective”, Psyche (9 September 2026; archived)
In an article tracing how the word Taiwanese—meaning the language spoken in Taiwan—has been defined, the following remarks are made about Wiktionary:

While dictionary entries aim for succinct clarity, their choices mirror shifting academic and geopolitical frameworks over time. Oxford [English Dictionary] defines Taiwanese as “the Chinese dialect of Taiwan.” […] Wiktionary, drawing on crowdsourced academic contributions, offers the sharpest linguistic nuance, defining it as “the variant of Hokkien spoken in Taiwan, the native language of the Hoklo.”

Hugo Tseng, “How Taiwanese Claimed Its Space”, Taipei Times (9 September 2026; archived)
Tip of the month
Authored on 1 September 2026 by TranqyPoo (talk)

Tired of adding tedious quote metadata? Look no further! Enquote is a Chrome and Firefox extension that does the boring part for you. Simply highlight the text, click the Quote button underneath its icon, paste the quote in the source editor and voilà: you now have a properly formatted citation!

At the time of this writing, Enquote is known to support the following:

Editors should nevertheless review the quote metadata for accuracy before publishing. Some fields are not auto-generated.

Did you know...
Authored on 3 September 2026 by Trooper57 (talk)
...Portuguese cardápio was coined by Brazilian writer Antônio de Castro Lopes in 1889 to displace the French borrowing menu?

Antônio de Castro Lopes (1827–1901) was a prolific polymath, writing from stage plays to articles in homeopathy. One of his passions was the study of Latin, while one of his dreads was the free influx of French and English loanwords into Portuguese during the 19th century. This led him to keep a newspaper column throughout 1889 where he suggested native equivalents or formed neologisms with Greco-Latin roots to substitute the borrowed terms. A compilation of all these coinages was released later that year, called Neologismos indispensáveis e barbarismos dispensáveis (“Indispensable neologisms and disposable barbarisms”).

He was successful in some of his endeavours: despite not replacing menu completely, cardápio is still widely used in Brazil. Most of Lopes's neologisms — now paleologisms — however, didn't survive the test of time and wouldn't pass our CFI, but the ones that did are currently listed in one of our categories.

The Atelier
Authored on 5 September 2026 by Sgconlaw (talk)
A hairy caterpillar crawls across the petals of a yellow rose.
The caterpillar of a vapourer (Orgyia antiqua) on a rose.

[T]he fairer the Rose is, the sooner it is bitten with Catterpillers; […]

Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde (1590)
The village idiom
Authored on 28 September 2026 by Qwertygiy (talk)
Illustration of a very angry hedgehog, literally a "little hater".
Scottish Gaelic gràineag (“hedgehog”), from gràin (“hate, hatred”)

One of the most underrated questions in etymology is not what's in a name, but why. Why did we start to call a spade a spade? What sage and ingenious ideas may have been drifting through the head of that first free-thinker who came up with the idea?

There are certainly many terms and phrases out there where there's no great mystery in this question. Take, for instance, the humble bluebird.

It's a bird. And, you see, it so happens to be quite blue.

Brilliant. An elegant solution. 10/10, five stars, no further questions.

Sometimes, however, we do have additional questions...

Got an idea for the next Village Idiom? I'm all ears!

Authored on 14 September 2026 by Equinox (talk)
Polyglot's Progress

I speak a single noble tongue,
The one to which the Saxons clung
Despite the Norman caitiff's wreaking:
English is my mode of speaking.

Non-English edits on the wiki
Might (you'd think) for me prove tricky;
But I am that which you are not:
An Autodidactic Polyglot.

My English tuned to such a pitch,
With Scots I'd surely "meit nae hitch";
So (benefiting from the sprachbund)
I leapt on Gaelic like a dachshund.

As my Celtic skills grew warmish,
I had a "craic" at Manx and Cornish.
Old PDFs look quite impressive!
(I hope the scannos weren't excessive.)

When I outgrew my native isle
I looked to Europe with a smile:
On French and German edit-benders,
I'd add the nouns and guess the genders.

My Continental work soon done,
I turned toward the Rising Sun
And swelled the ranks of proverbs Asian
By means of Babelfish translation.

I hope I shall not sound too breezy
Saying I found Zulu isi-
And brought to English readers closer
The consonantal clicks of Xhosa.

I wrote appendices on slang in
Inuit-Yupik-Unangan.
My ideographic pace was terrific:
Emoji first, then hieroglyphics.

All tongues to me now seemed demotic,
So sought I something more exotic.
I'd add all missing words of note,
All languages. (We'd had that vote.)

My scheme I soon contrived to bring on,
Editing Befunge and Klingon,
Voynich, Quenya, Stanford Geek,
And Unwinese and Yodaspeak.

The wiki work goes ever on,
And so it must when we are gone:
I've trained a fleet of A.I. bots
As Autodidactic Polyglots.

← Issue 1All issues · Contribute 
Letters to the editor
Add a comment

Better 5/10 for this issue. "Recent changes" section is poor. First item is a different-language different wiki has a newsletter (no one cares). Some templates being 20 years old (woopdeedoop). The rest is possibly noteworthy. I like thematic WOTDs, glad to see them shared. ID stuff is useful, but boy does Ioaxxere rabbit on! Justinrleung proves my theory that Wiktionarians should live more fascinating lives. Symbol of the month is informative, despite the topic (parking) being uninspiring. Traffic report goes in-depth, I like it. The atelier doesn't have its place here - leave that to Wikiquote, please! Finally, Equinox's poem is a peach! —User:Vealhurl (talk 21:58, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

(Just for the record, eq's poem is under The Atelier, that's the section for user creations!) Vininn126 (talk) 23:52, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Out on Bluesky I've posted about this issue on Bluesky. — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:44, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Quick? I thought that this was released quickly but then I looked on the main Headword page and noticed it was exactly a month (in UTC, for me it's still September). Anyways nice second issue, the SOTM section was interesting, in the traffic report I noticed that the tilcayo was mentioned on Wikipedia CurrentNews. user97104talk•wiki 00:17, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

Even better! I especially loved the Traffic Report and the collected Citations – this is very important information, and it’s great that The Headword has given us the opportunity to learn of it. Thank you and great job, @Ioaxxere and @Sgconlaw!!! Please nevermind WF’s bittersweetness.

And thank you The Headword editors for making Equinox sign as Equinox and not as User:~2026-12345-67. — Polomo ⟨⁠ ⁠oi!⁠ ⁠⟩ · 00:51, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh, I didn’t even notice the poem was by him! — Sgconlaw (talk) 04:38, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

An OK journal 7-7.5/10 for this issue. Some parts is becoming better but some being worse in my opinion. I don't like how you guys choose to interview Justinrleung again, no offense but we already interviewed him in the very previous issue, hope to see a new and interesting user in interview. And the village idiom is a brilliant and fun idea. Kudo for you @Qwertygiy 👏🤌! I wonder if you want to draw more than one pic if people request more. I believe if you do well, this section can appear in the front page (weekly, biweekly or monthly, not daily since I think it'll be exhausted for OP). This small project of you made me really exciting, it have so much potentials to explore and exploit. Hope other editors can join this one, not only recommended entries, but if you can, DRAW THEM! Queen Duck שא (talk) 15:29, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

@Queen Duck Issue 1 was Juwan (talk • contribs), not Justinrleung (talk • contribs). Pls add 0.1 points to your score, as per Wikirulez —User:Vealhurl (talk 20:57, 4 October 2026 (UTC)

Good work Equinox's funny (as in fun) poem was the perfect thing to end on – the highlight of this edition. The Symbol of the Month made me consider the writing that's on surfaces beyond the typical paper, screen, and stone. The Interview – I'm enjoying learning about the people behind the usernames. Opinion piece – senseIDs are also useful for {{senseno}} in image captions. And last, I like the themed decorative historical illustrations, with their descriptions of what's portrayed. —Vuccala (talk) 15:05, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

@Vuccala: thanks! I’m shamelessly claiming credit for the historical illustrations. I thought the large white spaces needed some brightening up. — Sgconlaw (talk) 15:12, 9 October 2026 (UTC)
@Vuccala Consider contributing! Vininn126 (talk) 15:27, 9 October 2026 (UTC)
@Vininn126:You know what, I think I will. To one of the shorter, fun segments. "Symbol of the Month" maybe! Vuccala (talk) 19:50, 9 October 2026 (UTC)
@Vuccala If you do, coordinate with @LunaEatsTuna! Perhaps on Discord. The atelier is always open. Right now The vandal is open! Vininn126 (talk) 20:03, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

Great I'm very happy that the journal has now progressed onto its second issue. Very fine work. Though I can claim the credit for having come up with the name, the true credit belongs to all who contributed the writing, editing, and structuring of the journal. Good luck on future issues! Howardcorn33 (talk) 15:57, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the name! It's perfect. Would love to see your username in future additions. Vininn126 (talk) 16:00, 9 October 2026 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Wiktionary:The_Headword/Issue_2&oldid=93511188"