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Are there any alternative standards to the IPA for phonetic transcription without the use of special characters? For instance, in this chart of ICAO phonetic alphabet, phonetic pronunciations are ...

We're evaluating the feasibility of sponsoring a member of the English community to speak at a conference in 2011. Speaking is a relatively big "ask", so this needs to be planned many months in ...

In a song video made by an American acquaintance, there is a joke that I don't understand. I am not a native speaker, and I guess most English speakers would understand what makes his joke funny. Is ...

I just retagged (well, I don't have retag privileges, so queued an edit for voting) a question that had the history tag to etymology but then I noticed there are 70-odd other such questions. Should ...

Examples (feel free to edit in more): What/who are “toy soldiers”? What do these confusing lyrics mean? What's the deep meaning in the lyrics of “Heavy Traffic” by Elton John? Some questions about ...

Unlike the community moderated SO, the new sites have specific moderators. But there is no way to contact the moderator other than the "flag post" We don't want every moderator decision to turn into ...

Our top-rated tag is usage. However this tag is nearly useless: the word usage is right there in the site title, and almost every question on the site could be construed to be about "usage" in some ...

The tag grammar is one of our most highly-used tags, though it is, unfortunately, so vague as to be nearly useless. I submit the following proposal as a way to break up this tag into something useful. ...

Would it be technically feasible to not bump old posts onto the front page when the only edit to a question was to its tags? I ask because as of right now, only 3 posts on the entire front page are ...

Answers to this question assert that there is no difference in meaning between these two words. So they should be merged?

Two recent questions contain NSFW in the title. Do we really need to do this? I think the title should be enough to understand if one should read the question when being in a specific place. We had ...

The block that provide a help about tag Wikis is not correctly rendered. The screenshot shows how I see it on Firefox 4.

In other SE sites, answers that contain just a link (even if preceded by see, try, etc.) are not considered answers, and users are suggested to flag the answer. Is that considered the action to take ...

On meta.english.SE, both the tags are used. retagging is used in three questions, while retag-request is used in more questions. The first should be merged with the second, and made a synonym.

homophone should be probably renamed homophones, to be consistent with the other used tags.

Possible Duplicate of: IPA usage, entry How to enter phonetic transcriptions? I notice that for questions where pronunciation is relevant (e.g. "What words are commonly mispronounced by literate ...

Is asking the etymology of the name of a town on-topic for EL&U?

Is there any difference between grammatical-number and pluralization, or should the tags be merged? Does using both the tags in the same question means anything?

I am referring to my question here. Within minutes of posting the question it was closed, and I am still confused about why. There are the comments: Maybe it's me, but I don't see the question ...

I was browsing old questions and answers and bumped into an odd scenario: Can “paper bag” mean any bag?. An excerpt from the accepted answer: Almost all on-line dictionaries define paper bag as: ...

There’s been a lot of discussion already (e.g. here, here) of what kind of questions are too basic — and the rough consensus seems to be that if a question can be answered from just standard reference ...

Someone edited my question, moving the question mark outside the quotation marks. This is not correct usage in the U.S., as it is in International English. Which convention does english.stackexchange....

I downvoted Karl's answer to this question through carelessness and ignorance, but I can't now reverse my vote. Is there any way round this? I'm still (forelornly, it seems) hoping for more feedback ...

Can anyone please explain why, in the list of Answers in my User Profile, some entries are highlighted?

This morning I tried expanding the list of comments of an answer, but it doesn't work. I tried also on Stack Overflow, on How to quickly theme a view? and I was able to expand the list of the comments ...

This is prompted by a discussion in comments in this question about a gender issue in English. Comments I (and others) made against Caleb's answer gradually veered into a more general discussion of ...

Moderators, could you please delete the tags pharase, opposites and contradictions? Thanks!

The Big ThreeTM sites get sparkly unicorns today. Where are our sparkly unicorns? I feel unloved. Hmph.

I was wondering—if we find an old question without an accepted answer, are we allowed to answer? Or should we expect down-votes for that? I don't know if it's a stupid question but I didn't find ...

Before adding a votable answer to the on-topic-off-topic question I figured some discussion would be appropriate. Are typography questions on-topic or off-topic? Why there's a difference between the ...

Consider this answer: What is the pejorative for people who only practice their faith while at the place of worship? Whited sepulchres. This is what they are called in that noted work of ...

I placed a bounty on one of my questions, expecting to select the bounty winner after the 1 week period had ended (assuming that this would allow everyone who might be interested to have a chance at ...

In english.SE, the quotation mark (") used in the title is replaced by a smart quote. Are they visible in all the browsers, in any platform?

I would be quite happy for someone to correct a minor spelling error in an answer (or question) that I posted. Would that offend some people? Or is there another reason that it is not allowed? This ...

I'm with English Language & Usage forum almost three months, but still not clear about the difference between 'Up-vote' and 'Accepted' answer. What does come up when I click Check (Accepted) mark ...

I have seen a few questions or answers with "Hello!" or "Hi!" in them. Is it safe to ignore these or should I edit them out? And, since they are new users, is there a tactful way to respond while ...

Here is the state of the tag usage as I wrote this question: On the the tags page, usage appears with the first seven words of the excerpt truncated, rendering it mostly useless: Furthermore, the ...

There are three questions tagged with vocabulary-building. The tag should be deleted, and the questions tagged with vocabulary.

This is a follow-up to Add a Wiki page for the "compounds" tag, or replace it with another tag; when that task has been completed, and no question is tagged with "compounds", we would ...

Just curious but what happens if you accept an answer after you've already accepted one? Does the original answerer lose the points and the new one gain them? Is it even possible to change your ...

compounds is without Wiki page. It should be good if the tag would have it, as the tag seems used for different purposes. Edit: I just noticed there is also the compound-sentences tag. Do the tags ...

Is there a best practice for giving sources after definitions, etc. (in posts)? I've typically just added a "from New Oxford American Dictionary" at the bottom but was wondering if there's a better ...

words is used in many questions, but it doesn't seem to have a specific meaning. All the questions are about words, even the one asking about a phrase or a sentence. We should remove the tag.

What is the purpose of history? Isn't there any other tag that would, even partially, be used instead of history? For example, the history of a word is its etymology; if I am asking for the etymology, ...

So far, there are just two questions tagged foreign. Do we really need it?

I have noticed a significant number of questions worded as: What is the difference between [first word] and [other word]? Some of differences are really interesting distinctions that stimulate ...

I don't know if there should be a single thread for proposed tag synonyms, but I'll go ahead and leave this relatively generic in case that's desirable (and assuming there's not already a thread for ...

grammar-checker seems a misused tag; in some cases, it seems more appropriate to use grammaticality. Should we remove grammar-checker, or does the tag have a purpose and we should write the Wiki page ...

Sometimes I notice that the number of views for a question I asked is 1, right after I posted the question. Does the view count include also me?

I just tried to vote a comment, but I got the following message. Daily vote limit reached; vote again in 8 hours. Does that mean there is a limit for the comment votes, or does the message simply ...