Lyre’s Dictionary.

Lyre’s Dictionary is a computer program that generates novel English words based on existing roots and patterns. For example:

futurarium · noun
a place for the future

It also exists as a bot on Twitter and on Mastodon, where it posts several new words every day.

Via MetaFilter, where an example posted is bibible “able to be drunk” (“According to Grammarist this should be bibable, because new words always take -able, not -ible”).

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    Grammarist informs us that “A noun is any place, person, idea, or thing.” I’ll go with Lyre’s Dictionary, which seems much more reliable.

  2. I think the definition should be ‘a place in the future’, i.e. a tensed noun.

  3. January First-of-May says

    because new words always take -able, not -ible

    Grammarist’s examples suggest a different regularity to me: English roots take -able, Latin roots take -ible. So drinkable but bibible.

    Perhaps the true answer is that words take -able, morphemes take -ible, which would also explain the infamous ansible. But then it’s accessible and not **accessable so maybe there’s some phonological stuff going on too.

  4. Latin roots take -able or -ible according to conjugation. So, bibible. Indisputably.

  5. “botanize · noun
    to make a plant”

    It’s a verb, and it already exists, widely and informally, in the sense of “to do what botanists do”, that is, to walk in nature and identify plants.

    Anyway, I like “bibible”.

  6. It well might be *convenient* if as between -able and -ible one was no longer productive for new coinages, but things are not always so convenient …

    Of course coined English words ending in -bible can be easily misparsed/mispronounced because of interference from free-standing “Bible.” One site I checked (favored by Scrabble buffs I believe) that lets you search for words by their ending letters had almost 800 ending in -ible, but only one other than “bible” itself ending in -bible, which was “ribible,” a noun that I did not know and that wiktionary says is obsolete. FWIW, it had 75 words ending in -bable, from “absorbable” through “untranscribable.”

  7. If ansible had to be ansable, the anagram wouldn’t work. Admittedly, it would if the word were insable, but then that isn’t anything like answerable.

  8. “botanize · noun
    to make a plant”

    One wonders if this includes faceplants.

  9. it’s accessible and not **accessable…

    Accessible refers to physical access: the shopping mall is accessible from Elm St.

    Accessable refers to web apps and the like: our terms and conditions are accessable from our home page.

    Admittedly, I just made this distinction up out of thin air but if it becomes established I would like to take the credit as well as the copious royalties.

  10. If so, then accessable would have initial stress.

  11. Botanize is calque of Russian word ботанить meaning “study hard”.

    Bibible as J.W. Brewer suggested should be analyzed as “bi-Bible”. Some sort of double Bible.

    All in all, pretty boring stuff. Maybe good for learning Greek and Latinate morphemes.

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    “bi-Bible”. Some sort of double Bible

    Not at all. The correct form for “double Bible” is, of course, dibible.

    People will be talking about “bicycles” and “televisions” soon, at this rate.

  13. If you can call dibs on something, it’s dibable.

  14. I have a Chilean friend who married an American and lives in New York. When he learns of something extraordinary, he often exclaims, “that’s unbilibible!”

  15. A futurarium is a place hosting exhibits of things that haven’t been invented yet, like self-driving cars, cold fusion and faster-than-light space travel.

  16. Via MetaFilter, where an example posted is bibible “able to be drunk“

    Thus unbibible means “unable to be drunk; abstemious, sober”.

  17. David Eddyshaw says

    Does it not rather have the sense of unwilling sobriety, like a football fan in Qatar?

    “Unbibible” is to “abstemious” as “incel” to “chaste” …

    (I should point out that the word is superfluous: we already have “unsot” …)

  18. Proof of roboticity from the Twitter feed are recoined words (leonid, athlete, refer, lenity, …) with definitions by turns current, novel, or obsolete.

  19. I just refreshed it and got “misbellify ‘to make beautiful incorrectly’,” which is somehow both stupid and great.

  20. Bibibilis found in the wild, p. 56, here.

  21. “Bicycle” is fine by me. For me, more annoying is “quadbike”. Not just an abomination of a construction, but a needless one. The opportunity was there to call the thing a “quadcycle” (on analogy with unicycle, bicycle and tricycle), but…

  22. Motorquad is better, since a quadcycle might be a pushquad. The Latin precedent of unicycle prefutes any argument for motortetra or even motortetrak.

  23. PlasticPaddy says

    @rosie
    Unfortunately one can also parse quadcycle as a vehicle with square wheels (or, as with quadbike, one used by university porters too corpulent to perform ambulatory duties).

  24. January First-of-May says

    The opportunity was there to call the thing a “quadcycle” (on analogy with unicycle, bicycle and tricycle), but…

    Quadricycle, surely?

    (Russian has sensible enough квадроцикл, and also квадрокоптер for “quadcopter” – not that either of those last two is not a giant atrocity against Greco-Roman roots in its own right.)

  25. Stu Clayton says

    prefutes any argument

    I love it ! The common ancestor of refute and confute. I take it to mean “dismiss in advance, without more ado”.

  26. David Eddyshaw says

    Prefutation saves a lot of time.

    It is important not to confuse it with prefutution.

  27. January First-of-May says

    Motorquad is better, since a quadcycle might be a pushquad.

    Now that I’ve looked it up, Wikipedia appears to say that a pushquad is a quadracycle, while a motorquad is a quadricycle. “Quadbike” is its own thing and can go into either category. Weirdly enough there’s no “quadrocycle”.

    FWIW, my favorite example of root origin mismatch is Altadena, which should of course have been Pequadena.

  28. If you can call dibs on something, it’s dibable.

    I would tend to spell that dibbable, since dibs is probably a native word (but then you’d think sack ‘bag’ is too, whereas it is ultimately Akkadian). Wikt is a bit confusing s.v. dibs; it refers to the counters used in the game of dibstones, which is apparently a version of jacks, but in a separate etymology it says that the game is dibs and it refers to throwing up a stone held in the palm of the hand and catching it on the back of the same hand.

    The streets in my city (and almost all other cities in these Latter Days of the Law) are full of motorized quadcycles, sometimes known as roadables or by less mentionable names.

    (kicking a stone so that his foot rebounded from it) “And thus I prefute the man whose name you are about to mention!”

  29. would tend to spell that dibbable

    I thought about that, but decided to go with the form more similar to the comparanda.

  30. Wikipedia appears to say that a pushquad is a quadracycle, while a motorquad is a quadricycle.

    There are also monowheel and dicycle, distinct from unicycle and bicycle.

    Hot take: vehicles with hybrid names are less likely to succeed. The military-industrial-prescriptivist complex at work.

  31. I tried the site and got cogniture: the result of knowing.

    This seems like a potentially useful word for philosophers, who can make a distinction between cogniture and cognition similarly to how linguists distinguish between implicature and implication (a distinction I struggle to understand).

  32. The distinction is straightforward: an implication is spelled out (“the Queen is English, and all the English are brave, so the Queen is brave”), whereas an implicature is implied (“I am out of gas.” “There’s a gas station around the corner”, which implicates that the first speaker wants gas and the second speaker wants to say where it can be found). Implicatures, unlike implications, are defeasible (“Unfortunately the gas station is closed today”).

    Both linguists and philosophers use these terms. The trick is to remember which term goes with which sense.

  33. @mollymooly: I don’t think hardly anybody involved with single-wheeled vehicles uses the term monowheel, at least in North America. The Wikipedia article you linked says, “Some modern builders refer to these vehicles as monocycles,”* but that greatly understates the case for the latter term. In my experience, people in the know, practically always use monocycle. (My father is a serious unicyclist,** and the unicycling community is naturally adjacent to the much smaller monocycling community.) This extends even to variants like “tandem monocycle,” for which I have seen plans, although never an actual constructed vehicle.

    * What typographical*** convention puts a verbatim mention (as opposed to use) in bold like this, rather than italics? One encounters this now and then, but I wonder if it is done according to an actual style guide, or just by people reaching, unsystematically, for a form of emphasis.

    ** In the early days of Google Street View, he could be seen mounting and riding his extra-large wheel on the streets near my parents’ house. When he got that custom unicycle, I inherited and learned to ride his original off-the-shelf one.

    *** Only a couple days ago, I learned that foundry and font share a root. The common factor of metal casting is obvious in retrospect, but I had not made the connection until I was reading a work from the 1930s (which I will comment separately on in another thread) that talked about “typefounders” and used the spelling “fount” for the typeface sense.

  34. in bold like this, rather than italics … I wonder if it is done according to an actual style guide

    Yes: Wikipedia’s Manual of Style says italics for mentions (WORDSASWORDS) but this is overridden by bold for alternative names for the article topic mentioned in its lede (BOLDALTNAMES).

    In the early days of Google Street View

    ICYDK the old streetviews can still be selected (unless they were deliberately deleted for e.g. legal reasons)

  35. First use of a synonym.

  36. an implication is spelled out (“the Queen is English, and all the English are brave, so the Queen is brave”), whereas an implicature is implied (“I am out of gas.” “There’s a gas station around the corner”

    What trips me up here is that I think of the first example as something stronger (or stiffer) than a mere implication; it’s a logically inescapable conclusion. So an implicature is something that’s implied, whereas an implication is … something that’s implied.

    Perhaps the issue is that ‘implication’ is used here in a way that’s not quite the same as its common meaning.

  37. David Eddyshaw says

    Yes, a logical implication is inescapable.

    Not its only divergence from everyday usage, either: anything at all follows logically from a falsehood: “If Elvis is alive, the moon is made of green cheese” is true.

    This is a bit of a cheat, though: what I’m referring to here is “material implication”, and there are other logics:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_conditional

    [“Modal” logics (there is no single unique definitive one, because what counts as “necessity” or “possibility” depends on what you’re trying to achieve) are both interesting and confusing. Aristotle himself failed to get the hang of them …]

  38. David Marjanović says

    bold for alternative names for the article topic

    And indeed, monocycle is a redirect to the monowheel article.

  39. @David Eddyshaw: Previous discussion of how anything follows from a false statement. I will probably never get tired of the xkcd comic referenced therein.

  40. [Can’t post my longer version with a different formulation than the Grammarist’s about -ible and -able. A second try prompts the riposte that I am trying to post a duplicate! So:]

    Keith:

    If so, then accessable would have initial stress.

    Why? That would be a most unusual stressing with any motivation, especially in non-US English.

    John Cowan:

    … an implication is spelled out (“the Queen is English, and all the English are brave, so the Queen is brave”), whereas an implicature is implied (“I am out of gas.” “There’s a gas station around the corner”, which implicates that the first speaker wants gas and the second speaker wants to say where it can be found). Implicatures, unlike implications, are defeasible (“Unfortunately the gas station is closed today”).

    To be clear, consenting adult philosophers say this sort of thing:

    • “The Queen is English and all the English are brave” implies “The Queen is brave.”

    In such talk “imply” means much the same as “entail”.

    Wikipedia, “Implicature”, gives an example very close to John’s second example but comments differently:

    A (to passer by): I am out of gas.
    B: There is a gas station ’round the corner.
    Here, B does not say, but conversationally implicates, that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context.

    Philosophers speaking carefully (less common than one could hope) do not say “B implies that the gas station is open”. I don’t like the example anyway. A better one:

    Abelard: Is that coffee you’re drinking?
    Boethius: Is the Pope a catholic?

    Boethius implicates that he is indeed drinking coffee.

  41. @Noetica: Why? That would be a most unusual stressing with any motivation, especially in non-US English.

    I can’t give you a precise reason, but my Sprachgefühl instantly suggested the same thing as Keith Ivey’s—even before I read his comment. However, I imagine it has something to do with the way the word access is used as a noun in current American English.

  42. Brett:

    Yes, I feel that too concerning “accessable”. I don’t say it’s not stressable* that way; I just wonder about it. OED gives a first-syllable stress to “processable, adj.”
    * OED has entries for “stressable” and “stressible”, cross-referenced and meaning the same.

  43. However, I imagine it has something to do with the way the word access is used as a noun in current American English.

    I don’t see how the noun is relevant. The verb has initial stress (in American English, at least), and when you add the productive English suffix -able to an English verb (as opposed to forming a word from Latin roots) it doesn’t change the stress.

  44. processable

    Since the verb process with second-syllable stress (meaning to walk in a ceremony) is intransitive, it can’t have -able added. The initial-stress transitive verb can.

  45. Keith:

    … when you add the productive English suffix -able to an English verb (as opposed to forming a word from Latin roots) it doesn’t change the stress.

    OED gives these pronunciations for recognizable (which it derives directly from English recognize):

    Brit. /ˈrɛkəɡnʌɪzəbl/, /ˌrɛkəɡˈnʌɪzəbl/, U.S. /ˌrɛkə(ɡ)ˈnaɪzəb(ə)l/

    Similarly for unrecognizable. Yet in both US and UK English recognize (as opposed to re-cognize, which is not involved) is stressed only on syllable 1. This may be a rare exception; but we do hear stress shifted in unfamiliar or nonce words like ?”complicatable”, which some would stress on syllable 3.

  46. See also OED pronunciations for justifiable and alkalifiable, both of which it derives directly from the English verbs:

    Brit. /ˈdʒʌstᵻfʌɪəbl/, /ˌdʒʌstᵻˈfʌɪəbl/, U.S. /ˈdʒəstəˌfaɪəbəl/, /ˌdʒəstəˈfaɪəbəl/
    Brit. /ˌalkəlᵻˈfʌɪəbl/, U.S. /ˌælkələˈfaɪəb(ə)l/

    And in the “declassify” entry:

    declassiˈfiable adj.

  47. I’m losing confidence in the OED’s research on US pronunciation variants. I would have said that recognizable had primary stress on the first syllable. Of the major American dictionaries, AHD, MW, and New World (2014) give the primary stress on the first syllable only; dictionary.com (and its predecessor Random House) gives both options, first or third syllable. A few minutes on Youglish will demonstrate beyond any doubt that both options are standard in American English.

    I have no explanation for this, beyond maybe if a word has that many syllables, its stress isn’t stable? I dunno. If it has any dependence on context (like the famously variable stress of -teen numerals), I can’t tell.

    The OED states in the entry for -able (revised 2009): “Primary stress is retained by the usual stressed syllable of the preceding element and vowels may be reduced accordingly”. Apparently it’s not quite that simple.

  48. I think it is hard to maintain anteanteantepenultimate primary stress. Are there examples of two-syllable verbs changing stress when -able is added?

  49. I would have said that recognizable had primary stress on the first syllable. Of the major American dictionaries, AHD, MW, and New World (2014) give the primary stress on the first syllable only; dictionary.com (and its predecessor Random House) gives both options, first or third syllable.

    I stress it on the third syllable, and the initial stress sounds weird to me. For what that’s worth.

  50. January First-of-May says

    anteanteantepenultimate

    The step below that is usually preantepenultimate; I recall having seen a version of this step that piled up yet another different prefix, though I’ve since forgotten what it was.
    [EDIT: Wiktionary for the rescue – it’s propreantepenultimate. I wonder if anyone managed to figure out something with a further different prefix for the step after this.]

    (I used to believe that preantepenultimate was the only English word with three different prefixes that all mean the same thing, but in fact there is another: hemidemisemiquaver, an archaic term for a 1/64 note.)

  51. Also “almost” is not the same as “before”.

  52. Right, but propreantepenultimate does fit the bill.

  53. David Eddyshaw says

    There is actually a thing called pseudo-pseudohypoparathyroidism. I had a colleague who claimed that he had seen a case that actually turned out to be common-or-garden pseudohypoparathyroidism, which made it an example (of course) of pseudo-pseudo-pseudohypoparathyroidism

  54. I would like to report that in today’s NYT Spelling Bee, ‘bibible’ is a possible answer. It wasn’t allowed, alas.

  55. Hemidemisemiquaver is not archaic, it’s current British. The next is quasihemidemisemiquaver whose fourth prefix doesn’t otherwise “mean the same thing” or semihemidemisemiquaver which isn’t different.

  56. Wikipedia has a entry on pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism. I couldn’t find a list of the longest one-word WP article titles.

  57. Disambiguation pages with the most “may refer to” entries as of 13 February 2020: St. Mary’s Church 782

  58. Of the “long words” category, this is the only one that’s in use, and non-jocularly.

  59. Keith Ivey: I think it is hard to maintain anteanteantepenultimate primary stress. Are there examples of two-syllable verbs changing stress when -able is added?

    Good question. I would guess not, but don’t know how to find an answer.

    Random selection from Wiktionary’s “Category:English terms suffixed with -able”: overridable is used most often in software engineering, and sometimes appears in contexts of law and regulation. No dictionary has entered it (as far as I can find) except Wiktionary and some sites that scrape Wiktionary, so the pronunciation is not well documented. Only 3 hits on Youglish, all overRIDable.

    Hat: recognizable … I stress it on the third syllable, and the initial stress sounds weird to me.

    Given how common it is, you’ve probably heard it a lot without noticing. I just checked 10 recent NPR stories with audio and found at least two with initial stress:

    two of the most RECognizable characters in children’s literature, 0:17

    one of the most RECognizable sounds on television, 0:37

    Of the rest, 5 had stress on the third syllable, and 3 had stresses close enough that it was difficult for me to decide.

  60. RECognizable
    I don’t know anything about analyzing prosody, but that sounds as if sentence-level intonation promotes the secondary accent of recognizable to a primary one.

  61. The verb override has final stress anyway (the noun has initial), so that’s as I’d have predicted.

    I had a boss who often said overwrite in place of override, but it was hard to tell when the choice was between overridden and overwritten and especially between overriding and overwriting.

  62. Keith:

    Are there examples of two-syllable verbs changing stress when -able is added?

    OED gives this adjective (from the English verb):

    preparable [UK ˈpreparable, preˈparable; US ˈpreparable]

    That’s the only clear case I found, but other finds are interesting:

    tiˈtratable [at “titrate”: UK tiˈtrate, ˈtitrate; US ˈtitrate]

    coˈllatable [but for “collate”: UK coˈllate; US ˈcollate; compare next]

    narratable [UK naˈrratable, US ˈnarratable; for “narrate”: UK naˈrrate; US ˈnarrate; compare UK naˈrrator; US ˈnarrator, naˈrrator]

    If OED wants to reflect US practice for “narratable”, why not also for “titratable” and “collatable”? Like other Hatters, I have long given up on OED as a high authority for pronunciation; but at least it serves to record inconsistencies (its own and others’), and ubiquitous poor observation and analysis. A clincher was this for “Ulysses n.“:
    Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈjuːlᵻsiːz/, U.S. /juˈlɪsiz/
    Nope, as discussed elsewhere. Not when British Joyce scholar Anthony Burgess is on record (passim) saying /juˈlɪsiz/, along with the rest of us with any glimmering of knowledge concerning Latin, modern Romance languages, or historical usage in English-language verse.

    In common unlearnèd Australian use: comˈparable and preˈferable, to say nothing of puˈtative. Let’s not be prescriptivist here. It’s all very muddy, in and out of “erudite” circles. And as others suggest, sentence-level stress often supervenes – as do conversational and other contextual factors.

  63. Anthony Burgess has been dead for 29 years. He can give no evidence on the *current* British pronunciation of “Ulysses”. As John Wells observed, it has changed rapidly in the last several decades.

  64. David Eddyshaw says

    I think I have a glimmering* of knowledge concerning Latin, modern Romance languages**, or historical usage in English-language verse.

    I say it à la OED.

    * No more, though.
    ** French is one of those, right? I’ve never been quite clear about that …

  65. ktschwarz:

    As John Wells observed, it has changed rapidly in the last several decades.

    Sure! But not in the straitjacketed way OED suggests. Many UK scholars are united with the great majority of Americans in saying /juˈlɪsiz/, unimpressed by an Oxbridgean caprice that swings against centuries of established practice.

    David E:

    I say it à la OED.

    Why? Would you do that in general reference to the mythic hero, or when reading Shakespeare, or when referring to the novel HMS Ulysses by the Scottish author Alistair MacLean, or when speaking of Papilio ulysses (the Ulysses butterfly) or Tennyson’s famous poem? (Well, consenting adults, and all that …)

  66. Keith Ivey: The verb override has final stress anyway (the noun has initial)

    Whoops, I missed that. Or at least, dictionaries agree that the stress is on RIDE, although to me it’s difficult to tell whether the stress is on the O or the RIDE in many cases, even in isolation in dictionary clips. And it’s easy to find examples in speech in context where the verb override (and even overcome) is stressed on the first syllable; I guess that has something to do with sentence-level intonation as Y suggested.

  67. … along with the rest of us with any glimmering of knowledge concerning Latin, modern Romance languages, or historical usage in English-language verse.

    I should modify that. Too extreme. Try this:

    … along with many of the rest of us who have some knowledge concerning Latin, modern Romance languages, or historical usage in English-language verse, and who apply that knowledge first when we choose among pronunciations.

  68. David Eddyshaw says

    Would you do that in general reference …

    Youbetcha.

    Why?

    Put it down to the exuberance of youth.

  69. David Eddyshaw says

    and who act upon that knowledge in choosing among pronunciations

    Your reformulation is acceptable to Us. We shall instruct the Destructor Fleet to stand down.

  70. Your reformulation is acceptable to Us. We shall instruct the Destructor Fleet to stand down.

    I have referred your case to the Committee.

  71. David Eddyshaw says

    Excellent!

    We shall be presenting our commandsarguments to the Committee through the usual channels.
    We firmly believe that there is every hope of this matter being resolved without significant losses on either side.

  72. A clear case of stress change on adding -able: translatable. The verb is TRANS-late in AmE, the adjective is trans-LĀT-able (dictionaries agree and so does video evidence). Huh, *I* thought it was TRANS-latable. Too bad for me.

    preparable, titratable, collatable, narratable

    I personally would have guessed that all of these have the stress in the same place as the verb — but that’s probably based on the usual -able pattern, not on hearing them spoken with any significant frequency. However, titratable is more common than I thought: it’s used not only by chemists but by winemakers and doctors/pharmacists, enough to have a small presence on Youglish, in which a handful of Americans all stress the adjective as ti-TRĀT-able, despite the AmE verb stress as TI-trate. More corroboration can be found by searching youtube directly. That is to say, OED got the American pronunciation right for this one. (MW and AHD give the pronunciation as TI-tratable, but I suspect they just applied the usual pattern and didn’t do systematic research, which is much harder than research on spelling or usage.)

    Similarly: verb LO-cate (AmE), adjective lo-CĀT-able (AmE and BrE, according to OED) or LO-catable (according to MW and AHD). I think the OED is right on this as well, but there may be some variation.

    I couldn’t find enough spoken examples of collatable, preparable and narratable to conclude anything.

    So tentatively, when -able is stacked on top of another Latinate suffix, that suffix may attract the stress, especially if it’s -ate. Maybe it has something to do with the analogy with nouns in -ation, since those are always uncontroversially stressed on the -Ā-. Just spitballing.

  73. I say all those words with pre-suffix stress, and initial stress sounds weird to me.

Speak Your Mind

*