One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meanings

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

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deque /dɛk/ - in computer science, a double-ended queue

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Tropylium »

I recently ran into roan (a.) "with a mixture of black and white hairs, so as to appear gray-haired from a distance".
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

Tropylium wrote:I recently ran into roan (a.) "with a mixture of black and white hairs, so as to appear gray-haired from a distance".
Not a big fantasy fan, I take it!

To correct you, though: roan is a mix of dark and white hairs, and the colours don't necessarily blur. In horses, black-and-white roaning is called 'blue roan'. There are also bay roans and chestnut roans (either of which can be called 'red roan'). Technically in horses it's more complicated, because it refers to particular genetic conditions that produce roan, while other conditions that may in some cases look visually similar aren't considered technically roan. But I suspect most people don't make those distinctions.

"Roan" is an adjective, but it's also a noun, referring either to the colour, the condition causing the colour, or to a horse of that colour. It's also used with non-horses.

So this and this are both roan.

Other monosyllables with related meanings include "ticked" and "merle".

Other monosyllables regarding horses include "bay", "nag", "mare" and "cob" (which has a range of meaning iirc).

Apparently 'roan' is also a type of leather, and a type of valley.
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Tropylium »

Salmoneus wrote:
Tropylium wrote:I recently ran into roan (a.) "with a mixture of black and white hairs, so as to appear gray-haired from a distance".
Not a big fantasy fan, I take it!
Evidently not the horsey kind of fantasy at least.

(Though I've still been aware of the Finnish equivalent term for long. And that's a fun thought: I wonder how far one could get with this same topic in Finnish. Probably not very…)
Salmoneus wrote:Other monosyllables regarding horses include "bay", "nag", "mare" and "cob" (which has a range of meaning iirc).
Interesting that you include mare but not e.g. foal or trot — more common yet for sure, but mare strikes me as closer to this latter group than to your other three terms.

(Would people also think of ewe, ram, sow, buck etc. as "rare words"? There are probably a couple relatively obscure words of this type, but I tend to assume people have learned at least the "standard barnyard animal" ones already from childrens' books.)
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Soap »

Adults, maybe. But the iPad generation has ditched the barnyard animals in favor of Pokemon.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

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Tropylium wrote:(Though I've still been aware of the Finnish equivalent term for long. And that's a fun thought: I wonder how far one could get with this same topic in Finnish. Probably not very…)
If you're talking about Finnish päistärikkö, could the word be a loan from Slavic (cf. Polish pstrokaty “multicolored”, “spotted”; Russian пёстрый id. &c.)?
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Neon Fox »

Alces wrote:An ort is a leftover scrap of food. The word may be derived from the English cognate of the German prefix Ur- added to a reduced form of the word eat.
I've seen 'ort' used to refer to the little scraps of thread one gets in sewing and embroidery.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

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Purely by chance, I just stumbled across the obsolete English law term tolt "a writ by which a cause pending in a court baron was removed into a country court."

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Tropylium »

Pole, the wrote:
Tropylium wrote:(Though I've still been aware of the Finnish equivalent term for long. And that's a fun thought: I wonder how far one could get with this same topic in Finnish. Probably not very…)
If you're talking about Finnish päistärikkö, could the word be a loan from Slavic (cf. Polish pstrokaty “multicolored”, “spotted”; Russian пёстрый id. &c.)?
The standard Finnish term is kimo. Päistärikkö seems to be a derivative from päistär "leftover fibres from cleaning hamp" (which, however, is indeed derived from Slavic, if from a different lexeme, as in Russian паздер 'straw, etc.')
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

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Tropylium wrote:The standard Finnish term is kimo. Päistärikkö seems to be a derivative from päistär "leftover fibres from cleaning hamp" (which, however, is indeed derived from Slavic, if from a different lexeme, as in Russian паздер 'straw, etc.')
Ah, we have this word in Polish (this meaning is, however, not universally known nowadays; the word became a generic pejorative descriptor in colloquial Polish).
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by linguoboy »

orf n. An exanthemous disease caused by a parapox virus, occurring primarily in sheep and goats but also capable of infecting humans.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

skeel - a shallow wooden vessel for holding milk or cream
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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
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I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by dhok »

rill- a small stream or brook.

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

dhok wrote:rill- a small stream or brook.
Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that one as rare! Maybe I was exposed to too much poetry (/geography) at an impressionable age...

Two near-synonyms that are a bit more obscure are gill and ghyll, which various refer to either a stream or or the ravine that carries it. Iirc, most places in England it's "gill", mostly meaning the stream, but in the North it's "ghyll", and traditionally refers to the ravine that carries the beck, though it seems it's now used for the beck itself now (if you look up ghyll scrambling, there seems to be disagreement as to whether you're theoretically scrambling the ravine but going in the beck a lot, or scrambling the beck but sometimes leaving it).
However, although it's theoretically a normal borrowing with a northern spelling, it's also "ghyll" in the weald, where there weren't any norse. Maybe it's jutish or something, or a reflection of later migration into the area. Anyway, in the weal it's the primary traditional word for small streams, which do indeed tend to form ravines, though not of the Northern type*, but i've not heard it used for the ravine, only the stream.

*what I mean is that the ghylls up north rush down the sides of hills, and are rocky and steep, hence the scrambling. They form ravines because they're steep, and hence fast and erode quickly. Wealden ghylls, on the other hand, have much shallower gradients; they instead form ravines because the underlying rock is soft and easily erodable. The ravines are therefore steep-sided, but sheltered, and generally wooded (where a state of nature remains), and they're a large part of the distinctively chaotic geography of the area.


Along those lines, have we had 'force', in the riverine sense?
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

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Does cwm fit in here?
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by linguoboy »

Pole, the wrote:Does cwm fit in here?
Isn't that just a cirque?

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Echobeats »

Plenty of quaint monosyllabic technical terms in Scots law.

blench – the most common form of feudal tenure in the system's latter centuries, under which no or a nominal feuduty was payable.
croft – a small agricultural holding in northern or western Scotland to which the Crofting Acts apply. Determining croft status is very technical but the starting point is the precise amount of the rent in 1886.
eik /i:k/ – add-on to Confirmation (≈ Probate). I'm sure you can guess the etymology.
fee – ownership subject to a liferent.
feu /fju:/– an area of ground held of a superior under the feudal system of landownership.
flit – (of a tenant) to remove oneself from tenanted ground at the end of the tenancy.
ish – expiry date of a lease (corruption of exit, I believe).
poind /pɪnd/ (yes really) – to seize a (moveable) asset belonging to/possessed by your debtor and sell it to satisfy a debt owed to you.
seised /si:zd/ – the state of having a completed title to (i.e. being the owner of) land.
sist – to put on hold (a legal action); to bring in a new party to an action (a somewhat confusing homonymy).
tack – a lease. (OK, this is no more technical than "lease" but it is obscure.)
teind /tɛɪnd/ – a tithe exigible from a landowner for maintenance of the clergy (the obligation came with the land).
thirled – legally bound to use the mill belonging to your feudal superior to grind your flour.

Many of these are not as antiquated as you'd think. Almost all land in Scotland was held under feudal tenure under the feudal system was abolished in 2004 (no, really). Modern Scots lawyers have to use croft, eik, fee*, ish and sist on a regular basis.

Some more from bagpiping: birl, cran, grip and throw are all terms for different musical embellishments consisting of specific series of gracenotes.

Rugby also has a few: maul, ruck, scrum, touch try. Not obscure if you follow rugby but nonetheless technical, in the sense that there are detailed rules for working out when a situation falls within the definition.

*We also use fee in its everyday meaning an awful lot, of course. :-D
Last edited by Echobeats on Sat Mar 18, 2017 6:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Pole, the »

seised – the state of having a completed title to (i.e. being the owner of) land.
How is that pronounced? /saist/? /seist/? /sist/?
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Echobeats »

Pole, the wrote:
seised – the state of having a completed title to (i.e. being the owner of) land.
How is that pronounced? /saist/? /seist/? /sist/?
Sorry, should have realised that needed the IPA. Now edited in. It's the same as "seized".
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Echobeats »

Shocked to see there are no linguistics terms on this list! What about calque and gloss? There must be more...
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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Ser »

I just saw perf for "performance (of a web application)":
Microsoft wrote:Note
Any single buffered file exceeding 64KB will be moved from RAM to a temp file on disk on the server. The resources (disk, RAM) used by file uploads depend on the number and size of concurrent file uploads. Streaming is not so much about perf, it's about scale. If you try to buffer too many uploads, your site will crash when it runs out of memory or disk space.
Actually, looking at this paragraph, "RAM" could also count as it's pronounced /ræm/, and maybe "scale" as well (though this usage seems weird to me, I'm more used to the term "scalability"). "Crash" could also potentially count.
Echobeats wrote:Shocked to see there are no linguistics terms on this list! What about calque and gloss? There must be more...
Stop, trill, voice, tone, phone, case, gap (when talking about relativization strategies), head, rime, stem, root, host (of a clitic), noun, fit (in pragmatics), type (in lexicography, i.e. a hapax legomenon), tag (in lexicography), phrase, theme, rheme.

The adjective bound.

The verb to rank (in optimality theory, note that as for the noun OT uses "a ranking" and not "a rank").

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

troak

- to conduct barter of items not integral to the fishing industry, when one participant is Scottish and the other is a resident of Greenland.

streal

- arrow, or pupil of the eye

streel

- slut, or to be drawn along swaying in a zigzaging motion

snathe

- to prune

saithe

- a type of white fish (commonly sold in place of cod)

Unfortunately, I've forgotten the other word I'd been meaning to add here. What's the word for a shallow wooden dish used for holding milk?
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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Vijay »

Skeel?

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Salmoneus »

Vijay wrote:Skeel?
Oh, I posted that one already, didn't I? Sorry.
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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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Re: One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meani

Post by Vijay »

Salmoneus wrote:
Vijay wrote:Skeel?
Oh, I posted that one already, didn't I? Sorry.
Yes, but I forgot. :D

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