I would hope that none of those examples were taking up space in a dictionary.

Collocation dictionaries are lists of collocations. The reason they're absent from single word dictionaries is because there's about 25x more collocations than single words.

And some of the entries on this list are wrong. "Good night" exists in OED as "goodnight" [1] because there are multiple ways it's used. One is the clausal phrase "I hope you have a good night", which can be modified by changing the adjective, e.g. "great night" or "terrible night". "Goodnight" the bedtime ritual can't be modified the same way, so OED chooses to write it as a compound word without spaces.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hot-dog_n

[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/goodnight_n

We act as if some languages have "compound words" that can encompass entire sentences (subject & object attaching to the verb as prefixes or suffixes) while others don't form compounds, and most are somewhere in between. But these are all statements about lexicographic conventions and say nothing about the languages. In reality all languages are muddles sprawling across a multidimensional continuum, and they abso-frigging-lutely do n't sit neatly in such pigeonholes.

I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"

To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach.

I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did!

(Before any LLM zealots attack me, yes, it is now possible to have a more exhaustive list of collocations thanks to LLMs. This doesn't contradict my point.)

Examples of collocation dictionaries:

https://www.freecollocation.com/

https://ozdic.com/.

Also the slider examples are abysmal. "I love you", "Go home" and "How are you" are not words by any stretch of imagination. For someone who makes word games, I don't see a particularly deep love of words here.

Edit: Obligatory reference to Borges's Tlön: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...

(1) Who counted those? Whence those numbers?

(2) The examples are normal two-word phrases with one word modifying the other, often categorised as an adjective. The examples are counter-examples to the very claim made in that article.

(3) Using Clause to brainstorm s.t. is a weird thing to say...

(4) I would say the use of 'lexicalized' is wrong or at least uncommon. It usually refers to specialised semantics of something that could be interpreted generically, too. Like 'sleeping bag'. Or indeed 'cold feet'. Lexicalisation may involve deleting spaces, like 'hotdog'. And I am pretty sure lexicalised phrasal words are usually intensionally listed in dictionaries. And so 'ice' is not lexicalised 'frozen water', but it is not overtly a phrase but is a separate atomic word.

=> I don't get the point.

My favorite adjective he's coördinated is "burntwing", used to describe moths spiraling downwards after passing through candleflames. If I had crafted such a descriptive contraction, my former styling would've been "burnt-wing", had I even been capable of generating such concise imagery [1].

McCarthy's stylings have helped me to reduce hyphenations in my own writings — reducing their usage mainly to contractedwords which might be all-too-confusing without them.

[0] pg104 has ten words that I do not know their definitions, yet through context they work to advance the storyline of character racists (book is set in 1950s).

[1] decades ago, during college burnout, I was searching for the essense of "burntwing" — reduced to writing a professor about "feeling like a burning airplane in tailspin." My trajectory back then was definitely burntwing.

On languages other than English: in general, different languages do word division very differently. At least in German and Dutch, many of those phrasal verbs are separable, meaning that they are one word in the infinitive but are multiple words in the present tense. So for example, where in English you would say "I log in to the website", in Dutch it would be "Ik log in op de website". "Log in" is two words in both cases, but in Dutch it's the separated form of the single-word separable verb inloggen ("I must log in now" = "Ik moet nu inloggen"). The verb is indeed separable in that the two words often don't end up next to each other: "I log in quickly" = "Ik log snel in".

Dutch, like German, has lots of compounds. But there are also agglutinative languages, which have even more complex compound words, perhaps comprising a whole sentence in another language. Eg (from Wikipedia) Turkish "evlerinizdenmiş" = "(he/she/it) was (apparently/said to be) from your houses" or Plains Cree "paehtāwāēwesew" = "he is heard by higher powers"; and these aren't corner cases, that's how the language works.

Wiktionary doesn't need to make that distinction between MWEs and Idioms and tends to conflate MWEs and Idioms as there is no separate "Wikidiom". Arguably, that multi-book confusion runs deep on the internet because Urban Dictionary should probably be fully titled the Urban Dictionary of Idioms and Slang.

It's not just page limits but also categorical limits and classic lexicographers would build multiple books/volumes, not just settle on one "dictionary". Classic scholars would often have a "reference shelf" with multiple dictionaries, books of idioms, thesauri, and more. The CD-ROM and then the internet has kind of tunnel visioned that this entire shelf can be merely "one app".

[1] I wonder how many here have ever been told something like "Prithee, husband, bring back a dozen canned goods from the market, for in the meanwhile I shall do my household chores".

"Words" don't have "spaces."

Phrases are made of words separated by spaces.

"Boiling Water" is not a word.

"Water" is a word. A noun, the subject.

"Boiling" is a word. An adjective, in this case. Which modifies the subject.

I don't know if you're trying to be clever, but you're not.

We could have a similar debate about whether common suffixes and prefixes should be regarded as individual words.

Much like "planets" don't really exist as a separate natural object, words don't really exist in natural languages. They are artificial concepts, and therefore we will always have edge cases.

I would argue that it is still a useful discussion, as it sheds light on the nature of language (or of celestial bodies), even if the definitions defy the same rigour as mathematical concepts.

Your "to me" is actually problematic, because it legitimizes this nonsensical idea and turns words and their meaning into something purely individualistic, which cannot end well for the current, but even more so for the next generation.

I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that two words, which are supposedly one word, definitely are not one word.

Yeah, I agree! Fuck ICE!

Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.

Presumably if the word thesaurus was actually "synonym dictionary" it would likewise be absent.

> Traditional dictionaries skip almost all such phrases, because they contain spaces.

Yes, because they're phrases, not words. I don't even understand what's surprising about this. Sure, the entire article talks about how dictionaries contain _some_ phrases; but it's clear it's not many of them. Dictionaries are for words, not phrases.

'N, culinary. A paste made of ground up nuts, sometimes with additional oils and other ingredients. E.g. "peanut butter", "almond butter".'

"Amusement park", same. Falls very much under the "place of recreation" definition of "park".

"Black hole" is maybe a bit different, because it's a scientific term - and certainly in a science dictionary would be included as a two-word item - but, for consistency, in a regular dictionary should be handled identically to the above, with a note on the word "hole".

While including noun phrases as singular entities in a word game is entirely appropriate, I don't think the OP has formed a rigorous definition of the concept that they are trying to describe. I agree with the other comment which suggests that they need some instruction / practice using a dictionary.

I suspect the entire list was produced by an AI entity which had not been prompted to avoid giving offense. I predict a range of (tedious) opinions about whether a prohibition on that particular word is an appropriate inclusion in a system prompt.

That's also not a term I've - thankfully! - ever heard, so I've no idea if it's hallucinated. This is not an invitation, HN, to define or explain it to me.

Another contemporary writer who worked with new words in a very creative way was Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun. Some were inventions using Greek, French, or Latin roots. Others were forgotten terms which he resurrected. Someone compiled a dictionary, Lexicon Urthus, which discusses the origins of certain terms and their placement within the series.

The article is questioning why some words don't meet the bar for inclusion in the dictionary. The word "boiling water" is one such word that it sees as being on the fence. The comments here demonstrate exactly why it is on the fence, but it remains unclear exactly what would be necessary for it to tip towards inclusion.

You really have to love the human messiness of language!