Tag: dictionary

A Mathematician Looks at the Collins English Dictionary

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I have several dictionaries on my shelf, among which is a well-thumbed Collins English Dictionary (third edition, 1991). Earlier this year I acquired the thirteenth edition (2018). At 26.5cm high, 20cm wide, and 6.5cm deep, and weighing approximately 2.5kg, it’s an imposing tome. It’s printed on thin paper with minimal show-through and in a specially designed font (Collins Fedra) that is very legible.

The thirteenth edition, which I will abbreviate to CED13, is a wonderful acquisition for any dictionary lover. It has a wide coverage, including

  • new words such as micromort (“a unit of risk equal to a one-in-a million chance of dying”),
  • obscure words such as compotation (“the act of drinking together in a company”), and
  • a wide selection of proper nouns, including my home town Eccles and, somewhat unexpectedly, Laurel and Hardy and Torvill and Dean (Olympic ice dance champions, 1984).

It has no appendices on English usage, mathematical symbols, chemical elements, etc., as are found in many dictionaries—which is fine with me as I rarely use them.

I decided to take a close look at some of the mathematical words in the CED.

“determinant n maths: a square array of elements that represents the sum of certain products of these elements, used to solve simultaneous equations, in vector studies, etc.”

This definition has two problems. First, a determinant is the sum, not something that represents the sum. Of, course, one will find in some textbooks statements such as “swapping two rows of a determinant changes its sign”, but it’s odd that this informal usage of determinant as array is the only one mentioned. A second problem is that the determinant is not a sum of products: it is a signed sum of products and it is the permanent (not in this dictionary) that is obtained by taking all positive signs.

“matrix n maths a rectangular array of elements set out in rows and columns, used to facilitate the solution of problems, such as transformation of coordinates.”

A matrix is more than just an array: its key characteristic is that it has algebraic operations defined on it.

“rounding: n computing a process in which a number is approximated as the closest number that can be expressed using the number of bits or digits available.”

Rounding is not specifically a computing term—it’s more fundamentally a mathematical operation and predates computing. Bits are special cases of digits. And rounding does not have to be to the closest number: in some situations once needs to round to the next larger or smaller number.

“index n maths c a subscript or superscript to the right of a variable to express a set of variables, as in using x_i for x_1, x_2, x_3, etc”

An index does not (except maybe in informal usage) express a set, but rather identifies a member of a set.

“supercomputer n a powerful computer that can process large quantities of data of a similar type very quickly.”

Supercomputers do mathematical calculations (and are ranked on their speed in doing so), which is not apparent from this definition. I’m also not sure why “of a similar type” is necessary. The PC on which I am typing is a supercomputer according to this definition!

“integral n maths the limit of an increasingly large number of increasingly smaller quantities, related to the function that is being integrated (the integrand). The independent variables may be confined within certain limits (definite integral) or in the absence of limits (indefinite integral).”

This seems to be an attempt to state informally the Riemann sum definition of definite integration. Sadly, it’s technically incomplete and sure to baffle anyone who doesn’t already know about Riemann sums. It would have been much better to simply say that integration is the inverse of differentiation. The second sentence is grammatically incorrect.

“fractal maths n a figure or surface generated by successive subdivisions of a simpler polygon or polyhedron, according to some iterative process.”

Surely any definition should mention fractional dimension and self-similarity? This definition excludes the fractal that is the boundary of the Mandelbrot set.

I’m not too surprised by these weaknesses, because in 1994 I wrote an article Which Dictionary for the Mathematical Scientist? (PDF file here) in which I evaluated several dictionaries (including CED3) from the point of view of their mathematical words and found problems such as those above in several of them.

Despite these criticisms, I very much like this dictionary and I use it as much as the other dictionaries on my desk. It is especially good on the computing side. I was pleased to see that my favourite editor, emacs, is included (though I’m not sure why it is not capitalized). Vi users will be sad to hear that Vi is not included. A good number of programming languages are present, including awk (uncapitalized), Java, and Javascript, but not, C++ (how would that be alphabetized?), Python, or R.

A particularly notable definition is

“flops or FLOPS n acronym for floating-point operations per second: used as a measure of computer processing power (in combination with a prefix): megaflops; gigaflops.”

This is much better than the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the singular flop as “a floating-point operation per second”. There are also entries for petaflop, “10^{15} floating-point operations a second”, and teraflop, “a thousand billion floating-point operations a second”. I just wish the latter definition contained “10^{12}“, because there is scope for misunderstanding because of the alternative meaning of a billion as a million million in the UK.

Acronymous Thoughts

According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD, 11th ed., 2004), “An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of other words”. Here are some well-known examples.

  • AIDS: acquired immune deficiency syndrome,
  • laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,
  • radar: radio detection and ranging,
  • scuba: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus,
  • snafu: situation normal all fouled up,
  • sonar: sound navigation and ranging,
  • UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization,
  • WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get.

There is even a recursive acronym, GNU, standing for “GNU’s not Unix”.

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Image courtesy of smarnad at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

On close inspection, the OED definition is imprecise in two respects. First, can we take more than one letter from each word? The definition doesn’t say, but the examples radar and sonar make it clear that we can. Second, do we have to take the initial letters from the words in their original order. This is clearly the accepted meaning. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed., 1993) provides a more precise definition that covers both points, by saying “formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term”.

In common with many fields, applied mathematics has a lot of acronyms. It also has a good number of the most elegant of acronyms: those that take exactly one letter from each word, such as

  • BLAS: basic linear algebra subprograms,
  • DCT: discrete cosine transform,
  • FSAL: first same as last,
  • MIMO: multi-input multi-output,
  • NaN: not a number,
  • PDE: partial differential equation,
  • SIRK: singly-implicit Runge-Kutta,
  • SVD: singular value decomposition.

New acronyms are regularly formed in research papers. Non-native speakers are advised to be careful in doing so, as their constructions may have unsuspected meanings. The authors of this article in Chemical Communcations managed to get two exceptionally inappropriate acronyms into print, and one wonders how these escaped the referees and editor.

Another question left open by the definitions mentioned above is whether an acronym has to be pronounceable. The big Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed., 2015) lists two meanings, which allow an acronym to be pronounceable or unpronounceable. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (5th ed., 2015) says “unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym”, while the Style Guide of The Economist (11th ed., 2015) also requires pronounceability, as do various other references.

Apart from SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), not many mathematics societies have pronounceable acronyms. In the “pronounced by letter” camp we have, for example,

  • AMS: American Mathematical Society
  • AWM: Association for Women in Mathematics
  • EMS: European Mathematical Society
  • IMA: Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
  • IMU: International Mathematical Union
  • LMS: London Mathematical Society
  • MAA: Mathematical Association of America
  • MPS: Mathematical Programming Society

SIAM’s founders chose well when they named the society in 1952! Indeed the letters S, I, A, M have proved popular, forming in a different order the acronyms of the more recent bodies SMAI (La Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles) and AIMS (the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences).

A situation where (near) acronyms are particularly prevalent is in research proposals, where a catchy acronym in the title is often felt to be an advantage. I suspect that in many cases the title is chosen to fit the acronym. Indeed there is now a word to describe this practice. In 2015 the OED added the word backronym (first occurrence in 1983), which refers to “a contrived explanation of an existing word’s origin, positing it as an acronym”. One backronym is “SOS”; see Wikipedia and this article by John Cook for more examples.

The Acronym Finder website does a good job of finding the meaning of an acronym, often returning multiple results. For SIAM it produces 17 definitions, of which the “top hit” is the expected one—and at least one is rather unexpected!