I have a dictionary app that lists “Word Origin” in the entry. The word origin values I’ve seen have been XXXAX, XXXBX and XXXCX. What do those letters represent?
Update: a screenshot for reference
You can also see a number of examples here.
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Sign up to join this communityI have a dictionary app that lists “Word Origin” in the entry. The word origin values I’ve seen have been XXXAX, XXXBX and XXXCX. What do those letters represent?
Update: a screenshot for reference
You can also see a number of examples here.
I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess that you're using Whitaker's Words, since those look like Whitaker's origin codes.
Each letter in the code indicates something about the word: in order, they're AGE
, AREA
, GEO
, FREQ
, and SOURCE
. The first indicates how early or late the word is attested; the second indicates what general topic it's related to; the third indicates where in the world the word was found; the fourth indicates how frequently the word appears in corpora; the fifth indicates which source Whitaker took the word from.
For all of them, a value of X
means "not known" or "not applicable". So none of the words you've been looking at are associated with a specific time period, area of interest, or region, and Whitaker didn't note his sources for them. But the fourth letter tells you roughly how common the stem in question is: A
is more common than B
, B
than C
, and so on.
A full description of all the abbreviations and their meaning can be found here.