[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you]

Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.

E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.

In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.

Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.

I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".

[1] https://ordbokene.no/bm/svart%20hull

> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

May I introduce you to the German language?

We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).

Well, being pedantic, my favorite hobby:

Frozen water represents a state change and that different state commonly gets its own word: ice/water/steam equates to solid/liquid/gas

Boiling/freezing water represents the state of the liquid, not the transition. Its descriptive. Water boils away into steam, or freezes into ice.

Should we consider luke-warm water also singular? What about body-temperature water? cool water? It makes sense not to treat adjectives/descriptive words combined with the subject as singular because the definition already exists in the root of the words (meaning of adjective word + meaning of subject word). Blue clay is another example, why would that be a singular?

It really only makes sense to me in the rare cases where the combination words represent something different or non obvious than the combined meanings of the two words (i.e to 'give up')

But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam.

As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice.

So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.

Steam?

Yeah, but the nice thing about natural language is, it doesn't matter what you think. People talk because they want to communicate something. You can try to talk your pet language at other people, but you will fail at communicating. So things have a happy way of sorting themselves out.

As an idiomatic expression, "Hot water" = "trouble".

Are there idiomatic expressions for warm/cold/dirty water, which mean something other than a literal adjective describing the temperature or condition of water?

It used to be iced cream, which is more descriptive.

Ice cream is a shortened pronunciation.

Yeah, this article brings up a good point per se, but then defeats itself with nonsensical analysis and examples

Japan is similar with 熱湯 boiling、お湯 heated、白湯 boiled once then cooled down、水 cold

It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.

in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?

I mean it’s interesting that this is generally the case with many (or even most) words across languages… But I’d wager it’s more the norm than the exception, so I don’t know if “boiling water” is that interesting of an example.

The rest of the article did a good job explaining that. I just think those were terrible examples for the introduction. I think "shut up", "good night", and "hot dog" would have really got the point across better, but those might already be in dictionaries.

I don’t see how boiling water could ever be a single word. Would that mean we need entries for every other liquid boiling?

i guess Saturday night could have some extra details explaining the context around our standard work week. But even that is a stretch.

If that were the case, there would be no need for collocation dictionaries :)

That's not really mentioned in the article, though. As far as the article is concerned, the right side of that slider is valid-but-possibly-too-rare-to-be-interesting, when in fact it's just garbage. This does not sell the concept well.

On my first encounter with a Unix machine (an SGI IRC) I had heard that system help was available with the "man" command, so I typed "man"; the resulting "apropro what?" made me laugh out loud, and the other people in the room looked at me like I was some kind of idiot.

I disagree that "saturday night" ever means anything other than the literal meaning of the nighttime of the day of saturday.

You can argue that there's a connotative association with the phrase. Sure. Just like "beach weather", or "blizzard conditions". But that doesn't make "saturday night" special in any way.

Cremesuppe is in the first dictionary that I looked in. But including every kind of Cremesuppe would have been too much.

You are right! So the situation for german is worse: Millions of words are missing... ;-)

not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".

More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?

Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?

It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.

That happens often with domain names, but then you get expertsexchange.com, penisland.net, whorepresents.com, therapistfinder.com, a Dutch pre-match analysis site voorspel.nl, or a site about the game overspel.nl.

Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs&t=1477s

Not to mention Tobias Fünke’s analyst + therapist web site, analrapist.com.

I had to look up "crash blossoms"! But that's just an idiom, which is always tricky in translation. It might also be slang. Idioms and slang are borderline dictionary material, different editors make different choices, and they change over time.

But "ginger ale" seems straightforward to me. It's an ale, flavored with ginger. Not even idiomatic, just descriptive. Root beer. Grape soda. Orange chicken.

In most English speaking countries it's a far from common phrase (ie. it's very USA-centric).

It's what your insurance gets from the hospital after they provided a service to you.

At the moment, I'm in the hospital. I've been here since 0500 Friday morning. I should be released tomorrow, Tuesday. During those five days I've had services from doctors, nurses, technicians and [everybody else necessary to run a hospital]. There were multiple uses of CT scanners, ultrasounds and many machines which go Bing!. Also, a surgical operating suite, of which I remember about 60 seconds of very bright white lights and very large-screen monitors suspended from ridiculously heavy-duty supports. Like, you could safely dangle four football players of your choice (gridiron, rugby or association, doesn't matter) from them.

A team of people will compile a bill for all of those services. The bill will be presented to the insurance company whose card I showed Friday morning. It will likely be less than a million dollars, but it could easily be more than a hundred thousand dollars. That's the right order of magnitude to consider: a good percentage of a house, maybe a very large nice house.

The insurance company will claim that some of these charges are too much. The hospital knows this, and there are three mechanisms in which they justify their prices. First, although the two Tums antacids have a street value of eighteen cents when you buy it over the counter in quantity fifty, the hospital buys them in blister-packs so to avoid cross-contamination until they reach the patient. Second, it is customary to pretend that only the services which a patient actually used can be charged for, so the in-house plumber, the gas plumbers, the cryogenic fluids specialists, the oxidizing gases technicians, the potable water testers, and the electricians among a cast of thousand all need to be paid for.

And third, there's emergency care for the uninsured.

The US is cruel, but not stupid. No, I lie, it is frequently both cruel and stupid, always to people already disadvantaged in some other way. As a matter of law, a hospital can't turn away or discharge a person who is likely to die without treatment, even if they can't pay. But the government doesn't provide money to pay for that.

Finally, most hospitals or hospital systems in the US are run by for-profit private companies. I won't mention organized crime in the same sentence, but one can reasonably presume that the two are interchangeable in terms of law-abidingness and willingness to trade down ethics for an increase in profits.

So, having created the bill and sent it to an insurance company, they will argue back and forth and finally some portion of the money will eventually be transferred and everyone will be more or less happy, right?

No. Because in the US, the standard for healthcare insurance is to avoid the moral hazard of people attempting to get too much healthcare by having the insurance company bill the patient.

Remember the bill that started out as the same scale as a house? 10% "coinsurance" is often considered generous. 20% is pretty normal. Some specific services will be called out with specific fees, and others may be "disallowed" -- and sent through entirely to the patient.

That's on top of the monthly payments that have already happened.

But I work for a tech company with an unusually enlightened attitude, so I expect that my family's fiscal impact from this bout of medical intervention will be limited to the parking fees that my wife paid when she came to visit me.

It's privilege, but I'd rather that the system be reformed so that everybody got it.

Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas; water in the gas phase is “water vapor” which also doesn't have a single word.

This is also an interesting case because “vapor” without a qualifier also refers to a suspension of solid or liquid particles in gas (of which “steam” is a particular example).

Right. (I’m not sure if you’re aware but that’s exactly what I said.)

Consider phrasal verbs like "shut up", "get lost" or "kick off". Knowing what the parts mean doesn't let you understand the whole.

In your native tongue you take these for granted, but in a second language you have to learn that the sum is more (or different) than the parts.

They don't get into enough learning lists, and from my perspective, they are great additions to word games because the more transparent compounds are unique and legit words that can more than double the accessible vocabulary.