roily

[William Ryan]

There is no point in consulting "British dictionaries" unless you 
consult the Oxford English Dictionary - the vast, comprehensive and 
continuously updated standard work. It lists both "roily" and the 
variant(?) "riley" with many examples, indicating predominantly US 
usage, and in the case of "riley" regional US usage. Like John, as a 
user of British English I totally unaware of "roily" - but did know 
"roiling" as a archaic or poetic word.

With regard to Paul's earlier comment that "roily" is unusual in being 
formed from a verb - we do not know that this is so, since "roil" also 
exists as a noun. Compare "seepy", "creepy", "jumpy", "rumbly", "moany" 
etc, etc - are these deverbal or denominal? Hard to prove. In colloquial 
English you can add -y as a formative suffix to many words and still be 
understood even if the resulting word is not in any dictionary.

As for the alleged absence of "runny" in English-Russian dictionaries, 
it is in the Oxford Russian Dictionary (3rd edn is the one I looked at) 
which gives "mokryj" for describing a runny nose, and in my 
English-Russian section of the 1995 Penguin Russian Dictionary, which 
gives "soplivyj" in the same sense.

Will Ryan

On 22/04/2013 15:13, Josef Malkin wrote:
>
> I do know what roily means, I just hesitated to use it in my 
> translation, not finding it in the British dictionaries. Being 
> tempted, though, by the nice alliteration: "roily rills" decided to 
> consult  the experts.
>
> Josef.
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 3:23 PM, John Dunn <John.Dunn at glasgow.ac.uk 
> <mailto:John.Dunn at glasgow.ac.uk>> wrote:
>
>     Indeed, but the answers are more interesting on SEELangs, and in
>     any case I wanted to know why I didn't know, which a dictionary
>     wouldn't necessarily tell me.  It seems that part of the problem
>     is that the verb 'to roil', which until this morning was equally
>     mysterious to me, is obsolete in British English, but current in
>     the U.S. variety.
>
>     I have also discovered a further complication.  It may be that the
>     adjective 'roily' is derived not from the verb, but from a noun
>     'roil': this is listed in the Concise Scots Dictionary, which
>     notes that the noun is recorded from the late 19th century onwards
>     in Argyll with the meaning 'a storm, a heavy sea'.   It is
>     conceivable that this noun was used elsewhere in the
>     English-speaking world, not necessarily with the exact same meaning.
>
>     John Dunn.
>
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