Talk:compressable

RFV discussion: June 2023–January 2024

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).

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compressable and compressability: misspellings or not?

They don't have any significant usage compared to the proper spellings:

• compressable, compressible at Google Ngram Viewer
• compressability, compressibility at Google Ngram Viewer

It's common for adjectives ending in -ible to be misspelled as -able (see also accessable, compatable and visable, which btw have similar ngrams).

Note that I don't care about whether or not these pages are deleted or not but I think that given the Ngram statistics, if they exist they should be classified with {{misspelling of}} rather than {{alternative form of}}.

--Push-f (talk) 12:08, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

@Push-f welcome to Wiktionary. You've made a good case for the term being a misspelling. I'm not quite sure why Equinox advised you to bring this term here to RFV; this forum is about verifying the mere existence of words, and this word clearly exists. Our threshold for establishing this is to find three uses in published works, which is trivially possible here. It would assist to hear from Equinox himself, I feel. This, that and the other (talk) 12:40, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi :) Yeah, I agree that this discussion probably better belongs in the WT:Tea room. --Push-f (talk) 13:05, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I won't lie: it's a fair RFV. However, it's a long time since Latin was a default subject in schools, and putting -able on a verb is something we do every day; and there are lots of extremely high-quality citations available. I think it's really stretching (or wannabe-Latinist pedantry) to call this one a "misspelling". Equinox ◑ 16:45, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

I would probably have spelled it this way myself, to be honest. However, no lemmings contain an entry for this word. And the ngram evidence is striking. Even raw Google result numbers indicate that the "correct" form vastly outnumbers the "wrong" form. Perhaps this can partly be explained by people learning the spelling of the very common collocation "(in)compressible fluid".

Would you support (a) a (nonstandard) label, (b) a (proscribed) label, or (c) a usage note to the effect of "Traditionally, this spelling is not considered correct. Most dictionaries only contain an entry for compressible." This, that and the other (talk) 02:15, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

@Pushf @This, that and the other "I'm not quite sure why Equinox advised you to bring this to RFV": it's a weird case but I suppose we are RFVing the word qua word, as opposed to a misspelling. It felt like the correct forum. Equinox ◑ 16:47, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it would be right to call these misspellings. Adding -able to compress makes sense, and there are plenty of words that can be spelled with different variations of the same affix – corruptible/corruptable and collectible/collectable being examples very similar to this one. At worst, a (nonstandard) label might be appropriate, but I don't think we should be telling people that compressable "isn't a word". Binarystep (talk) 02:42, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Looking at the Ngrams, I think it's clear that "corruptable" is just as infrequent as "compressable" compared to the other variant ... it's in a different order of magnitude than collectible/collectable, so I think it would be nice to somehow consistently communicate this difference via templates. The Appendix:Glossary currently defines "nonstandard" as:

Not conforming to the language as accepted by the majority of its speakers; frequently considered incorrect.

I don't think that we are in a position to determine whether or not one of these words is "accepted by the majority of its speakers". Perhaps we should introduce yet another form-of template {{infrequent form of}} to express the difference in frequency in a non-judgemental manner? --Push-f (talk) 06:37, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

About how much time does it take to collect the facts for each pair of entries? Would we want to have a link to the NGrams search in the template, so that the work wasn't redone? How many pairs (or larger groups) of alternative forms do we have in English, other languages? DCDuring (talk) 14:02, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

• RFV settled Worm spail (talk) 14:11, 31 January 2024 (UTC)