gjerawlins@watdaisy.UUCP (Gregory J.E. Rawlins) (04/09/85)
<DDT>
Hello again,
In my endless search for curious words i stumbled into this
newsgroup a few weeks ago. It seems to me that you guys (neuter
sense!) make up the perfect group of people to ask for word
collections. What i'd like to know is what book(s) exist that
contain the following sets of "collectible words".
- all words which end in <mumble> (eg. "-nymy" patronymy,
toponymy, eponymy, pseudonymy etc.) and a description of the
etymology of the class of words *as a whole* (i.e. as opposed to
just looking it up in the O.E.D.).
- all collective nouns (eg. gaggle, herd, swarm, hive, bevy
etc.) and (of course) their etymology.
- all words for crafts (eg. cobbler, cooper, wainwright etc.)
- all words which have two exactly opposite meanings (eg.
cleave, fast etc.). (Are there any with *three* mutually
orthogonal meanings? - i'm not even sure what this means!).
- all words on a particular subject (eg. under "food" we
might find words like fruitarian, commensalism, bulimia etc.)
- all words which hash together if you only consider their
letters and not the order of the letters, i guess you could call
this a dictionary of anagrams (eg. kiln and link would hash
together).
- all abbreviations used in literature (don't scream! i mean
things like "i.e." for id est, "q.v." for quo vide, "eg." for <?> etc.).
- all "false" words, by this i mean all words which were put
into dictionaries in error and then entered the language (the
only such word i know is "ye" which arose because of a misreading
of an anglo-saxon character).
- all similies and how they entered the languages (eg. why is
someone "as deaf as a post", "as busy as a bee", "as dead as a
doornail", "as drunk as a lord(fish)", "as crazy as a coot" etc.
[ speaking of coot, did the expression "he's a crazy old coot"
devolve from the similie? are there many such derivations?] ).
Well, i have many more but i think i'll wait for responses to
this list before i post more. Happy hunting!
greg. (just call me the linguistic magpie)
--
Gregory Rawlins CS Dept.,U.Waterloo,Waterloo,Ont.N2L3G1 (519)884-3852
gjerawlins%watdaisy@waterloo.csnet CSNET
gjerawlins%watdaisy%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa ARPA
{allegra|clyde|linus|inhp4|decvax}!watmath!watdaisy!gjerawlins UUCPmjn@teddy.UUCP (Mark J. Norton) (04/11/85)
> - all words which end in <mumble> (eg. "-nymy" patronymy, > toponymy, eponymy, pseudonymy etc.) and a description of the > etymology of the class of words *as a whole* (i.e. as opposed to > just looking it up in the O.E.D.). I could respond to many of the others, but this is one I've had personal experience with. I was involved with natural language R&D at Wang Labs a few years back, and was assigned the task of writing a program to find the root of a word. This is by no means an original project, so I collected up info from other similar programs (Winograd, etc), and attempted to extend it. To test for endings on words, I took a fair sized word list (Random House Collegiate) and wrote a program which inverts all the words in the list (net.nlang => gnaln.ten) and sorted the new list. This gave me a list of words from which could be extracted, all words which end in <ending>. This was very useful to me, since I then had many examples of how the word was modified to add the ending (modify => modified). This satifies the first part of your request. As a side project, I started collecting a list of word endings (prefixes as well, but that's not of intrest here). I happened to be reading Webster's Unabridged one day (not uncommon in that line of work), when I noticed that many endings had definitions associated with them. Furthermore, some of these had etymology explained as well. This satisfies the second part of your requirements. It is unfortunately the case that such work has not be published to any great extent, publishers would see little profit in it. It is of intrest to a limited group of people. A compendium of similar works, perhaps in almanac form might be viable, though. I'm afraid you actually want such a source, you will have to make it yourself given the algorithms above. Mark J. Norton decvax!genrad!panda!mjn PS. I am still very intrested in this subject, and have continued my researches on my own. Correspondence on it is invited.
cdl@mplvax.UUCP (Carl Lowenstein) (04/12/85)
A quick raid of the bookshelf turns up the following:
collective nouns:
An Exaltation of Larks James Lipton, Grossman Publishers 1968
assorted words ( books by Willard Espy):
The Game of Words Bramhall House, 1972
An Almanac of Words at Play Clarkson N. Potter 1975
O thou Improper, thou Uncommon Noun Clarkson N. Potter 1978
Another Almanac of Words at Play Clarkson N. Potter 1980
Have a Word on Me Simon & Schuster 1981
words from nature:
Pedigree Stephen Potter & Laurens Sargent
Taplinger Publishing, 1973
mostly word games (two by Gyles Brandreth):
the Joy of Lex Wm. Morrow & Co, 1980
More Joy of Lex Wm. Morrow & Co, 1982
books I can't find this instant include
Oddities & Curiosities of Language Bombaugh, pub. by Dover
something by Stephen Barr of Woodstock, NY
(frequent correspondent of Martin Gardner)
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
{ihnp4|decvax|akgua|dcdwest|ucbvax} !sdcsvax!mplvax!cdljcp@osiris.UUCP (Jody Patilla) (04/12/85)
> - all collective nouns (eg. gaggle, herd, swarm, hive, bevy > etc.) and (of course) their etymology. There is a book which I believe is called "An Exhultation of Larks" which covers collective nouns both real and imaginary. Fun reading, nice illustrations. -- jcpatilla "'Get stuffed !', the Harlequin replied ..."
das@ucla-cs.UUCP (04/16/85)
Here's some help for the reverse word list:
*The English Word Speculum*, compiled by J.L. Dolby and H.L. Resnikoff,
Lockheed Missles and Space Company, Sunnyvale, CA, 1964. (Library of
Congress Catalog Number 64-8921)
This lists 73,582 words in several different orders:
Volume I: The Random Word List
Volume II: The Forward Word List
Volume III: The Reverse Word List (This is what you want, although there
are no etymologies, just the list of words. The words are grouped
by number of syllables (deduced from the placement of vowels, so it's
not perfect), so it's (a small bit of) fun to open to a random spot
and start reading aloud -- most contiguous words have the same stress
pattern and usually rhyme, since they're alphabetized right-to-left.)
Volume IV: The Double-Standard Word List (combination of Forward and
Reverse on a subset of the words -- those which appear in TWO standard
sources)
Volume V: The Reverse Part-of-Speech Word List (like Volume III, except
the major grouping is by part of speech (no, I don't know how they
handle words that fit in more than one class))
-- David Smallberg, das@ucla-cs.ARPA, {ihnp4,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!das