Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Monday 3 August 2009

Deadlihood

In that little box at the side that pops up random limericks from the OEDILF, I just got a limerick for the word "deadlihood". As it's not a word I've ever heard I did a Onelook search to see how many dictionaries it's in. Not many is the answer. Still the OEDILF does aim to include all words, however obscure they may be.
What intrigued me was the meaning. Deadlihood is the state of being dead. (At least according to the obsolete MW definition.) So why isn't livelihood the state of being alive?

3 comments:

robert said...

Always wondered whether one is able to declare somewhere new words.
Also in the German language, there's a word for not being hungry anymore (satt), but there's no word for not being thirsty anymore.
Kid was just awake, diaper running over, changed it withouth having his mother awake - guess that's a pretty livelihood kind of situation.

Bob Hale said...

I'd always thought of "satt" (a cognate of the English "satisfied" and also "satiated") as being neither hungry or thirsty, of being full. "Ich bin satt" = "I've had enough". Certainly I've used it that way and nobody has ever corrected me. Was I wrong? Were they just being polite?

robert said...

Good morning Bob,
don't know about them, but being 'satt' as I know it, is manly used for not being hungry anymore.