What's in a word?
The article I'm reading at the moment is about, among other things, entailingness. I had to look this word up in the OED, since I hadn't heard it before and in fact wasn't aware that it was a word at all. Turns out it isn't a word, at least in the sense that it isn't in the dictionary. But then I started to wonder; I understand the meaning of it, and it works perfectly well in the context, and maybe the question of what is a word is far less clear than I was thinking at first.
The OED random word feature gave me mangonel, a word I had never heard before which refers to ' a military engine formerly used for throwing stones and other missiles'. Is this any more of a word than entailingness, just because it is in the dictionary, when I don't at all understand it? What criteria do we want to use for saying that something is or isn't a (proper) word?
The OED random word feature gave me mangonel, a word I had never heard before which refers to ' a military engine formerly used for throwing stones and other missiles'. Is this any more of a word than entailingness, just because it is in the dictionary, when I don't at all understand it? What criteria do we want to use for saying that something is or isn't a (proper) word?