Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Should this oxymoron question be reopened?
Oxymoron pronunciation
This question is closed for not including research. Is this because the specific dictionaries are not cited?
I think the question is fine, if that is the only problem.
I think ...
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A resource for finding letter frequencies with certain restrictions
I'm looking for a resource where I can see the frequencies of letters in with respect to their position inside the word and the length of the word. I'd also like to see the frequencies of different ...
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Do you like the new layout?
A few days ago the layout of SE sites front pages has changed, to a considerable extent IMO.
I know that it is probably the result of a hard and carefully thought process of programmers and site ...
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Who will take up the mantle?
Happy new year!
tl;dr: there will be a moderator election some time in March. Start thinking about if you'd like to be elected.
UPDATE The community management team have let me know they are working ...
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Any good POS tagging websites?
I thought I had found one that was pretty good (Parts-of-speech.info), but I just entered the sentence "The kids hoot." and it told me "determiner noun noun." If it can't identify &...
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Metaphor classification
When I asked a metaphor related question, that is now closed, I was told to read the following article by Richard Nordquist about the different metaphor types. I am now looking for a more ...
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Do we cover history *of the use* of phrases? "Who-said-it-first" research questions?
I just suggested that this question, regardless of edits, might never be on-topic here, because "When did this phrase first appear in print" isn't really etymology, or even linguistics; it's ...
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Would a question about a specific English language tool be on topic?
Can language tools (typically, but not exclusively, software tools) be asked about on English SE?
I have a question about how I can work out where a term is used. It's along the lines of:
A common ...
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2021: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
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Etymology of words in translations
Maybe this should be in linguistics but I'll try here...
I have had this idea for a long time but productivity has never been part of my character. I'll take full credit of the idea and I am willing ...
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How to find a partner to learn English together?
I'm a Chinese. I want to find a friend from abroad to practise English. I think that it will be better to learn a language by communication.
I appreciate it if you know some ways or some platforms.
...
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Is there a tool or website that can form paragraphs or sentences from specific words?
I'm learning new vocabulary and I thought it would be helpful if there's a tool to take specific words as input and form a meaningful paragraph from them.
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Lack of comments to explain downvotes and recommendations to delete
I'm new to Stack Exchange, so I haven't had many experiences with it yet, but something that I am finding problematic is a lack of comments to explain downvotes or recommendations to delete answers. ...
user442862
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How to avoid a second ban on English Stack Exchange?
A while back, I was blocked from asking questions on the English Stack Exchange, which struck me by surprise. Having never been banned from a site on the Internet before, this was new to me. On the ...
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What dictionaries can help translate the Wycliffe bible?
I am unsure what dictionary nowadays has translations of Middle English. As of my research, the language has changed rapidly in that time as of settlement and like migrations from other countries in ...
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Proposal for a policy on mentioning slurs
When I say "mention" or "mentioning" I mean it as in the "use/mention distinction".
When I say "slur" I mean
A derogatory or insulting term applied to ...
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Request to reopen "Resistance decreases with temperature"
"Resistance decreases with temperature". How to interpret this sentence? doesn't seem like an unreasonable question to ask on ELU, but it's been summarily closed with the "justification&...
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Wherever you are... Happy Thanksgiving [closed]
We live in tumultuous and troublesome times; some of us have suffered personal losses while others are counting their successes...
Whatever side of the cosmic fortune cookie we crumble into, we ...
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Workflow for finding words in a text that are not in GSL or AWL
As an English teacher, I want to be able to quickly identify words in a given text that are NOT on the General Service List (GSL) or the Academic Word List (AWL). This will help me understand which ...
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Please help me improve my question on 'dishonest mistake' (re the term 'honest mistake')
The question: There's the term 'honest mistake', so what is 'dishonest mistake' synonymous to?
I am not really sure I have anything to say in the body besides the link except that ...
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Why was the question "Why are English words are so hard to spell?" closed as POB, and how can it be fixed?
The recent question on Why are English words are so hard to spell? was initially closed as being opinion based, which is a little strange.
Perhaps people seeing that it could not be answered simply ...
tchristMod
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Why was this question on usage migrated to ELL?
I asked a question about the usage of a particular phrase:
In what regions or countries would this usage be considered correct, and where would it be considered incorrect?
I attempted to word the ...
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Resources for increased complexity in writing
I have recently purchased a book called "The Describer's Dictionary : A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations"
It's an incredible book, but it's about "things" rather than, ...
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Convert plural to singular and visa versa
Can anyone please help me find an ONLINE singular to plural (and visa versa) converter that will convert a list of words at once? I've found plenty that do one word at a time.
There are so many online ...
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Be a bastion of democracy! Let's pin accepted answers at the top of the page! [duplicate]
Stack Overflow—where questions get often hundreds of votes every week for many weeks—has recently stopped showing accepted answers at the top of the page, deciding instead to use only votes by users ...
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How can I upload a short audio clip of English so that I can ask for help with its transcription [duplicate]
Can I upload here a audio clip of English,like .mp3 or .wma
so that some native speakers may help me with its transcription
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Book recommendation about languages from the linguist's perspective
Not sure if book recommendations are allowed, but I'm looking for a reference book that contains details about a wide variety of languages, written for linguists. For example, let's say I wanted to ...
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Should accepted answers appear first, just above the highest scored answer, or should answers now appear only in order of score? (Vote by Oct. 19)
Moderator note
After a period for voting including as a featured question, votes have been tallied on this question as of 16:50UTC on 19 October, and the results are as follows. Note that only ...
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English Grammar book on 'Voice Change' and 'Narration Change'
I want to know the name of some English Grammar books, in which :
(1) The Voice Change (Active to Passive and vice-versa)
(2) The Narration Change
have been discussed in details with examples.
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Google Ngrams, an object lesson
This is just a fun factoid to entertain you.
By now you should know not to put too much stock in Google Ngrams result graphs, and insist on a deep dive into the individual results. I thought I'd ...
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Is there a formatting convention when referencing a document name, or otherwise similar "object"/attachment?
As a tangent from my original task of finding out how to underline text when posting on Stack Exchange sites, I came across this answer. I've followed the same set of formatting conventions for a ...
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Looking for a list of malapropism by frequency of occurrence
I am interested in cataloguing the most common malapropisms in current spoken English. Examples would be mistakes like tenet/tenant, pundit/pundint, specific/pacific, etc. Does anyone know of a ...
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Any good structured English dictionary dataset?
I'm a NLP researcher and am looking for a English dictionary dataset to train a language model? Any suggestion? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) right meets my need, but it seems that they rarely ...
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Should this question be really closed?
I don't see this question about Omission of if in a conditional phrase as being the duplicate of Must conditional sentences begin with “if?”. Yet this is the stated reason for the closure of the ...
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Closing a question: tag specificity and the merits of viewing the question in a vacuum
I'm referring to this post I had from earlier: Collocations for litigation.
Judging by the comments, which were helpful, let there be no mistake about that, I appreciate any and all such input.
To get ...
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Request to reopen a closed question (or get suggestions for rewording)
My question "Are there cases where a closing quotation mark has no matching opening one?" was closed with the reason "This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting ...
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Justification for 'opinion based' closure on translation question?
This is really not a complaint, I am just trying to understand. Could someone explain to me why this question is considered opinion-based? The OP is actually asking for an explanation of tendencies of ...
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Converting post to Wiki answer
We had a very interesting question about an old translation. I posted an answer which was partly inaccurate, but then I received a lot of good suggestions and I was able to combine those into a fairly ...
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Why was this high-voted question closed?
Scrolling down the long list of closed, migrated and duplicated questions today, I eventually found a gem only to see it was closed.
Fourteen users had up-voted what seems to me a rather interesting ...
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List of English word research tools [duplicate]
I once discovered a post on this site that had a very comprehensive list of English word research tools, but I am having difficulties finding it again. Apologies for a potentially off-topic or ...
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Why are so many questions suddenly being locked? [duplicate]
It seems like, in the past few weeks, suddenly lots of questions are being "locked" to disable/hide comments. (Eg) To my knowledge there was no "comment war" or such for these ...
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Why can't we help programmers with English language usage?
As I understand it, questions about nomenclature, including language for use in coding, are considered off-topic at EL&U.
Why is that? What was the rationale for deeming them as such? And does ...
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Why was my question about proper english terminology migrated to a software engineering discussion? [duplicate]
I recently had a question on the proper name of an operation that performs a double complement migrated to a software forum. This question was not a software question, but merely a question about ...
user206315
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Why are we moving all the comments to chat?
I've seen a lot of lengthy comments sections being moved en masse to chat. The reason I discovered this site and began relying on it and eventually joined it was because of a comment by tchrist on the ...
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Why did my question get insta-locked?
Pretty simple. Asked a question: What's a word to describe adding something unless it already exists, in which case I retrieve it?
It got locked right away. Not even sure why. No comments are ...
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What's the best Dictionary for intermediates? [duplicate]
I was looking for some fine English dictionaries for intermediate use.
Hope someone can share some dictionaries which provides definitions that easy to comprehend.
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What do you like to see in questions?
motivation
There has been a recent increase in activity on Meta.
I find this encouraging, because my sense is while a quiet Meta can indicate a site running smoothly, lacking drama, in my experience ...
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Why is the culture here so broken?
My first question here, When and where did the new sense of "normalize" begin?, has been closed due to being "off-topic."
TL;DR summary of the question: There is a recent sense of ...
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Why is this question on hyphen usage downvoted?
My question Is the hyphen in the adjective phrase “just-[past participle]” mandatory? currently stands at +3/-6.
The question has seen some activity in the last few days, but it only received more ...
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Onboarding new and valuable users
Before the beginning of the 2019 pandemic, I regularly saw older and even lower-rep 3K users welcoming noobie users on the main with at least some kind of boiler-plate comment such as...
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