111
The Anglo-Saxon calendar only had two seasons, winter and summer, each six months long. They had words for other periods of the year, but they weren't considered seasons.
At some point near the beginning of Middle English1, a four-season calendar was adopted. However, the other two seasons didn't have definite names. We can see from the OED that their ...
62
A string of letters doesn’t have to be in a dictionary to be a word, but, as it happens, there is an entry for legit in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is given as both an adjective and a noun and defined as being a colloquial abbreviation of legitimate. The earliest citation is from 1897.
Whether and how you use it is up to you.
55
I use the word performant often, and its meaning (in my opinion) is subtly different from that of fast or efficient. The most performant network might not be the fastest, or the most efficient, but the one which provides the best overall service.
My IT systems are both performant and resilient.
The above seems (to me) to be very succinct. The word ...
52
TL;DR:
The premise that autumntime “is not a word” is faulty: it is a word.
Unlike most dictionaries, the OED does include autumn-time.
It is quite rare in comparison with the other seasons’ versions.
Variations in punctuation, spacing, and capitalization do not matter.
This answer is not meant to detract from Peter Shor’s, which I believe is both ...
48
A chemist would formally call it chirality in a molecule and, by exentsion, there'd be a high-likelihood of chirality being used for similar phenomena in the sciences and other formal contexts.
More informally (such as here) it would be known as handedness, with right-handed, at least in the case of a shape like a swastika, likely denoting clockwise ...
41
Whateverize is always a word
Yes, of course versionize is a “real word” — and no disparaging remarks about its parentage should be made in polite company.
This is because ‑ize is a productive suffix in English that’s used to produce a new verb from various nouns and adjectives. That means that any word derived by combining an existing one of those using ‑...
37
In mathematics, the word orientation is used to talk about clockwise versus counterclockwise. Using this, one might phrase your question as:
How are the arms of the swastika oriented?
or
Which orientation do the arms of the swastika have?
The word "direction" can also be used to similar effect, although it is more general.
37
The root word drama fits: "This is due to the drama of the day."
Drama
3 a : a state, situation, or series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces
b : dramatic state, effect, or quality - the drama of the courtroom proceedings - M-W
36
In French, it's an actual word that means something like performs effectively, efficiently, and well. So, French students use it regularly because it sounds like English, although I'd classify it as a false cognate.
36
It's too soon to tell for sure...
This is an unprecedented situation where a head of state's typo became a widely mocked online meme. Essentially, Trump coined a new word and then openly challenged the public to guess what it meant in a follow-up tweet.
A word like this, that becomes famous in a single day, could disappear and remain meaningless, or it ...
33
The current antonym appears to be recombobulate, as least as this sign from Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin would have you believe (image via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel):
That’s the place at TSA checkpoints where you get to put your shoes and belts and jackets and piercings back together.
32
'Cromulent' is simply a made-up word, in fact, made up to describe another made-up word from the Simpson's animated show.
It was coined, as you noted, by the writers for that Simpsons episode in 1996. It has only caught on in certain circles. A very small minority of English speakers would recognize it and use it properly (as a synonym of 'acceptable').
...
32
I presume you mean "solution" in the sense of finding a way to overcome a problem. In that case, "solution" is the noun form of "solve". There's no need to take a noun derived from a verb and then derive yet another verb from that noun. You say "We are working on solving the problem", NOT "We are working on solutioning the problem."
If by "solution" you ...
32
Where the authors of the book wrote randomically, they meant randomly and in fact intended to write randomly. This is demonstrably true.
Randomically is not a word known to specialists and having a technical meaning (even an obscure one), because nobody is using it in published works – it is not found anywhere in the Google Books corpus (see: Google Ngram ...
28
English writing often uses slashes to form two-letter abbreviations, plus the one-letter w/ – some examples, roughly in order of frequency:
I/O – “input/output”
w/ – “with”
c/o – “care of”
A/C – “air conditioning”
w/o – “without”
R/C – “remote control”
b/c – “because”
Like most abbreviations, these are less common in formal writing, although some of them (...
28
Is legit an actual word, or is it a slang word that has been shortened from legitimate?
Any "or" question can be broken down into two questions, so let's do that.
Is legit an actual word?
There are two common definitions for "actual"; it can mean "existing" or it can mean "genuine". So let's break that down into two questions:
Is legit an existing ...
27
Scrabble's standard for what constitutes a word, as Janus Bahs Jacquet notes in a comment, is whether or not it appears in a dictionary. For organized play, specifically, the word must appear in an official dictionary currently published by Merriam-Webster; various other dictionaries have been used in the past. This is rather different from a writer's ...
26
The reason you haven’t found it in a dictionary is that it doesn’t exist, as a word.
As a popular culture reference, it relates to the episode of 'Blackadder' where the title character decides that the best way to annoy a man who claims to have recorded every word in the language is to use words that he can’t have recorded, because Blackadder has made them ...
24
It's most likely to be a typo for coverage given the context, though by most metrics there are plenty of more likely typos.
Based on an analysis of error distances, and taking into account QWERTY keyboard layouts, the rather obvious coffee comes out top. Tweeting at midnight, does that mean too much or too little? But coverage is the highest-ranking word ...
23
The word performant is engineering jargon for something that may not be objectively efficient or optimal/fast but meets the performance expectations for which it was created. When an engineer uses the word performant, they mean that it's as fast and efficient as you would intuitively expect it to be. It's not meant to declare that it's the optimal or best ...
22
I would count it as jargon and I'd never use it in prose. It's a programming/maths term meaning if and only if and should be restricted to circles where it's likely to be understood (edit like XKCD ).
The question of whether it's an abbreviation is interesting. It's obviously shorter than "if and only if" but I think I'd say it was a more of a symbol. ...
22
Drownd is an archaic form of drown from which drownded is an archaic form of drowned. It is still found in some dialects either by survival or by emphasis of the -ed since the rhymes-with-round sound of drowned may not sound as obviously past-tense to some ears as others.
It's incorrectly frowned upon as incorrect, by people whose dialects did not retain ...
22
Both "w/" and "w/o" were common, very informal, U.S. abbreviations in correspondence, and in tight spots on data tables, until recently. "C/o" has always been used in addressing letters to third parties: "John Jones, c/o Smith family..."
The other "slash/shilling mark" abbreviations were so uncommon that they usually were not used because of lack of clarity....
19
I would steer clear of that one. It only exists as a joke in that Simpsons episode you referenced. Ms. Hoover only used it to support another joke word: embiggens. No one uses it seriously, but you might get a laugh out of it.
19
"Embiggen" is not a word I would use in formal communication. It was introduced as a joke on an episode of the television series "The Simpsons," and even in that fictional universe the authenticity of the word is questioned:
"'Embiggens'? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield."
"I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word."
19
Consider drain [MWD]
to exhaust physically or emotionally: feeling drained at the end of a long workday
You could say
Working all day in the hot sun had quickly drained her.
17
I'm afraid it's not a real word, and the inability to find it any dictionary will confirm that.
Richard Ayoade used the 9 letters on the countdown board in a humorous manner as, had it been a real word, it would have won.
The episode in question was not a "real" episode of Countdown - I believe it was an episode of The IT Crowd.
17
Unaccept is not a word? I find that unacceptable! :P
(rare) To rescind one's acceptance of - Wiktionary.org
See?
The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary - Merriam-Webster.com
Oh rats.
(rare) To rescind one's acceptance of - YourDictionary.com
Hah!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There aren't any definitions for unaccept yet. - ...
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