"Partial-Birth"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 09:35:30AM -0400, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> At 4/20/2007 09:20 AM, Fred Shapiro wrote:
> >On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> >
> >>No, but _partial-birth abortion_ is in OED.
> >
> >My bad.  I searched for "partial birth" in the online OED and nothing came
> >up.  I guess I should have moved on to examining the entry for "partial,"
> >where I would have found it.
>
> Gee, I would hope (or else I need to modify my own search strategy!)
> "partial-birth" would show up in a Search for Quotation Text (or Full
> Text) if "partial-birth abortion" is present!  And the Search
> facility ignores the hyphen vs. space difference.  (The OED2 CD-ROM
> does -- e.g., "part-time" and "part time" yield the same number of hits.)

Did you try it?

(I assume not :-) )

Yes, if you enter _partial-birth_ with or without the hyphen
in any of the more specific search interfaces, you'll find the
examples under _partial-birth abortion_; the hyphen is
ignored. What Fred encountered was that if you enter only a
part of a compound in the main "find word" search box, you
will not get the full compound. This happens with
"partial-birth" in "partial-birth abortion" as well as "man"
in any of the zillion compounds with "man", which demonstrates
why you might not want enable this as a default in your search.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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