c4countdown

So the ODO has made some MAJOR changes. Essentially most of the words in the full 20 volume Oxford Dictionary of English are in. This includes obscure and obsolete variants. See http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... sh/gointer and http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... lish/gwine

1. Will these be allowed in Countdown now? Many of us are considering going on the show so this is quite important!

2. Here are some of our members' views: http://www.apterous.org/ticket_view.php?ticket=3018 - what's your view on these? Post below

Well, they're in the ODO, so yes, they'll be allowed, as long as they maintain the usual criteria of course.

If it's true that most of these new entries to the ODO are obsolete words that have no recorded usage examples in recent history, then I think they'll have to do something about it. Obscure words and regional dialect words have always been in the dictionary, and allowed on Countdown, but those words have been in current usage. If they really have imported the whole OED into ODO, then most of the new entries will be words that nobody has used for hundreds of years, and it would seem silly to allow them in a word game.

However, I don't think that's happened. What makes you think the whole of the OED, or most of it, has gone into ODO? I've just taken a random volume from my copy of the 20-volume OED (it happens to be volume 6), picked some words at random from that, and looked up the ones I didn't know on ODO. The uncommon words I found in the OED were GLYCURONIC (a chemistry term referring to glucuronic acid), GLYDE (a variant of GLEYD, an old horse), GUBBLE ("to make the sound rendered by 'gub': a verb formed to imitate an inarticulate sound"), FORHARDEN (the same as FORHARD, which means "to harden"), GENTY (genteel), GARGARIZE (to gargle), GRAMOCHE (a variant of GRAMASH, which in turn is a variant of GAMASH), and FULVOUS (dull yellowish-brown or tawny). Of those OED words, the only ones in the ODO are FULVOUS and GAMASH (though not GRAMOCHE or GRAMASH), and FULVOUS seems to have been in for a while anyway.

In the interest of full disclosure, I also randomly landed on GRAVITATE, GALLERY, FORGOTTEN, GUMBOIL and GLARE, but didn't bother looking them up on ODO because they're reasonably well-known.

So are we sure these new entries are just historical? Perhaps "gointer" and "gwine" are in current usage but we just haven't heard them. Just because a word is marked "rare" and we haven't heard of it, doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed as long it can reasonably be described as being part of modern English. For example, we all expect DELATION to be allowed even though it's "archaic".

The issue is not that the whole ODE is in the ODO, but the flavour of the words which have entered the ODO is a lot more ODE-like. For instance, with the ODO before this update we never saw 15 random spelling variants (that's not counting the -ed, -ing variants thereof) inserted. With that in mind, I don't think the argument that we've simply not heard of gwine is tenable - are we to say the same for guin, guining, gwain, gwaine, gwainin, gwaning, gwaying, gwyin, gwyne, gween, gwoing, gwan, gwi, gwi', and gwen? And everyone knows that the correct Jamaican patois term is gwaan/gwwaan (http://www.metrolyrics.com/reggae-fi-da ... hnson.html)

It's interesting to know that this isn't simply a wholesale integration of the OED into ODO. I'm certainly hoping we'll hear from someone in the know exactly why this has happened, and on what basis they chose which words to add. It's very hard to believe that common usage was their intention - the vast majority of the new words I've been able to find are either 'historical' or 'rare' by their own classification, or seemingly niche terms from specialist fields.

There are sensible words too. For example RANDOMIZER, which has been declared a bunch of times on apterous (mostly with an S though, which doesn't seem to be valid!).

In terms of niche technical words, if you are involved in the field, then it's nice to finally see what seems a very common word make it in. For example, MORA is a widely-used word in Linguistics that wasn't valid before.

Maybe Oxford's intention is just to have more words from their vast collection searchable online (for free)?

If I were reading an old book and saw GLYDE or GUBBLE, I might look up the definition online, and with Oxford Dictionaries being one of the foremost providers of such a service, I would expect them to have these words on their list. The question of whether they mark these latest ODO additions somehow as 'from ODE' or whatever isn't really relevant unless the remit of ODO was always supposed to be exclusively words in common usage.

Agree that it poses a problem for Countdown though, which (apparently) does have this remit.

If this is their September update, then hopefully a full word list will appear at http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/rec ... o-the-oed/

Paul Erdunast wrote:If this is their September update, then hopefully a full word list will appear at http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/rec ... o-the-oed/

Let's hope so, then we can get Apterous updated quicker!!

I've seen a few news articles going around this morning (like this one) talking about the "addition of 1,000 new words to Oxford Dictionaries" which I hoped would shed some light on the situation, but all the examples they give are the sort of modern word that one would expect to be added in one of the usual periodical ODO updates (things like AWESOMESAUCE and BANTS) and curiously, all of these words seem to have been given the proper treatment on ODO with audio pronunciations, line breaks and usage examples, unlike the other ones we've been finding (like OUTWRITE and GOINTER) which conspicuously lack these.

Does the figure of 1,000 new words include GOINTER etc.? If so, why have they gone to the full effort with some of the words but not others? If not, and the addition of these words was a separate exercise from their usual updates, then that would suggest that their aim with these words was something other than to reflect modern usage.

Outswim is in, so I'm happy

I guess a reason the ODE was restricted by frequency before was just size. Not many people want to buy a 3/4 volume dictionary, and then search among
hundreds of arcane entries to find "goat". With an online dictionary, these things aren't an issue, so Oxford may have just included all those words.

I think that it will be a case of "what Damian/Susie says goes" as to whether OUTWRITED et al are being allowed (OUTWRITED hasn't been underlined on my spell check, curiously). Certainly smacks of Series 42, when the dictionary was updated to the COD10, and as a result, whilst words such as CYBERPUNK went in, all of its compound words went out, such as COWGIRL and, famously, ROADSIDE.

If there's no longer going to be a common usage standard then I think there's little reason for Countdown not to move onto a set word list like CSW, which would minimise the risk of mistakes by Dictionary Corner and also relieve them of the need to make contentious judgement calls.

FLID overlooked again.

I went through the ODO last night and made a list of all the headwords:

All headwords
All Countdown-valid headwords

If someone was so inclined they could:

1. Go through the ODO page of every invalid "all headwords" entry and check if those pages mention variants which might be valid. If they do, add them to the valid headwords page
2. Go through the new list of valid headwords and check for all valid variants on those entries and what part of speech they are
3. Apply all the relevant inflections based on the part of speech

Then you'd have a proper list of what's valid. I don't have the time or energy to finish this but someone might.

Thanks Jon - to be clear, are words like gustnado allowed in countdown? http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... h/gustnado

If not, they're erroneously included in your list of countdown-valid headwords, despite being US English.