Talk:alotted

RFD discussion: April–June 2014

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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alotted

Reasonably sure this is a typo. Scores a lot of Google books hits (13,000), but other forms of the hypothetical verb "alot" ("alots", "alotting", "can alot", "will alot") get little to nothing. A lot of noise in the results, due to the common typo for "a lot". Given that "alotted" and "alotting" are the most numerous results, I think it's some sort of strange way of compensating for the double "t" by undoubling the "l". Smurrayinchester (talk) 15:39, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Is it common enough to be a common misspelling of allotted? DCDuring TALK 20:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

• Delete. A misspelling of allotted. Donnanz (talk) 23:47, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
• Keep at least as a common mispelling: (alotted*500),allotted at Google Ngram Viewer. This is per common practice, as we do have Category:English misspellings. There is also Help:Misspellings, a non-policy page, which says "Wiktionary accepts common misspellings". WT:CFI does not expressly have a regulation stating what shall happen with common misspellings; it has WT:CFI#Spellings. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:24, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Keep as common misspelling; remove the separate senses it has now. Equinox ◑ 14:30, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

• Keep per Dan Polansky and User:Equinox. bd2412 T 14:32, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Is there a way to stop links pointing to that page from being blue? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:01, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't see why we'd generally want to link to a "misspelling" entry — or are you asking this with a view to avoiding typos? Equinox ◑ 16:05, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I would suggest the opposite. There were only two incoming links to the page; one of them was a misspelling in a definition, which I fixed just now, and would not have known about but for having looked at the incoming links. bd2412 T 18:44, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

@Equinox: Exactly that. We all make mistakes; a red link has more than once prompted me to correct a typo I've made whilst writing an entry. Including the string __HIDDENCAT__ on a Category: page stops that category from appearing in an entry's category list when that entry is included in that category; is there something similar that can be added to the pages that are only misspelling entries, which would stop blue-linking (or else somehow flag that link as being one for a typo)?

@BD2412: I wasn't suggesting that we not have entries for misspellings (although the blue-linking is a good reason not to). And besides, there is no need for a misspelling entry and/or a what-links-here to find these typos; a normal search would suffice.

 — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:54, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, redlinks sometimes help catch typos, but that shouldn't really be a reason for keeping or deleting anything. --WikiTiki89 16:50, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89: Not a good reason, no, but it would be nice to have the best of both worlds. Such blue-linking–prevention could also be used for rare and obsolete spellings (which we definitely do want), too. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 17:46, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Delete as a too uncommon misspelling.

I see no evidence that this is common by any reasonable definition of "common", based on relative frequency. The Google N-Gram presented shows it to be occurring about 0.2% as frequently as the correct spelling. At COCA, for example, it occurs once relative to some 1100 instances of allotted. It doesn't occur at all at BNC. The corpus of Global Web-based English (GWE) has 41 occurrences relative to 5400 instance of allotted. If we had corpora of secondary and tertiary education examination essays, I'd expect a higher percentage, but we have no quantitatively reliable corpora that show it is "common" relative to allotted.

Including this is setting a precedent of less than 0.8% at GWE relative to the correct spelling, which seems to be the most misspelling-laden of corpora and about 20 in a billion (.2 in a million) relative to the word count of the entire corpus. DCDuring TALK 21:07, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

WT:CFI#Spellings gives ocurred, occurred as an example of what "may well merit entries"; it gives no other example. (ocurred*3000),occurred at Google Ngram Viewer shows the factor of 3000. By my lights, factor 3000 in GNV is still acceptable for inclusion, in the copyedited corpus used by Google Ngram Viewer. At User_talk:Dan_Polansky/2013#What_is_a_misspelling, in the table starting with "beleive", there was only one example much below the 500-factor band in which "alotted" lies: "condensor". We are not overflooded with misspelings; we have 1,595 entries in Category:English misspellings. What you should do, IMHO, is present a method and calibrate it using what you consider examples of common misspellings. What are 7 examples of what you consider common misspellings? --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:09, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Kept, no consensus to delete. There is a policy discussion waiting to happen here, however. bd2412 T 03:27, 7 June 2014 (UTC)