"Partial-Birth"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/20/2007 09:46 AM, Jesse wrote:
>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 :-) )

I tried "part-time" with OED2; I do not have access to on-line OED from home.


>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.

I just tried -- with OED2 -- Find Word "part-t*" [asterisk at end]
and found "part-time" and "part-timer" (as well as "partterig", which
I will shortly add to my 16th c. vocabulary!).  Would Find
"partial-term*" have found "partial-term abortion"?  But as Jesse
says, and since a hyphen is ignored, one would not want to Find for "man-".

However -- If I don't Find, I generally also use Search (with wildcards).

Joel

Joel

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