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The quoted definition appears to answer your question already. An 300 ml cup of water is full if and only if it contains exactly 300 ml water. There's no mystery there, if you think of a cup the i...
Markdown doesn't work, but HTML does. The HTML source for the following is taken from the question ("preferred solution"): This is a sentence with 中文 characters 日本語が分かりません
My own experience has been that: You can definitely learn a lot by only listening/reading, never speaking You will still gain some ability to speak/write even though you never practice it It w...
As you can read below, emō meant to take, buy, gain, procure. But perimō meant to destroy and annihilate. Plainly, their meanings differ! So why was perimō formed from emō and compounded with per-?...
Remember that lawyers love to put their own stamp on language, and hold on to fanciful usages while pretending they are the clearest, most common parlance. https://dictionary.thelaw.com/demise/ is...
I revamped Serious-Telephone142's answer for grammar. Negotiation involves a metaphorical pushing and pulling, a give and take. This sense is preserved in the modern English word 'intractable,' ...
Where should I learn about words that came into Modern English most likely from Norman? Please example some words which most likely came to Modern English only from Norman (i.e. words which are li...
THEMES and PATIENTS are rather similar, and not all linguists distinguish between these roles. A THEME typically moves from one location or one person to another, like the letter in (31...
Etymology Online suggests: The phrase to wit, almost the only surviving use of the verb, is first recorded 1570s, from earlier that is to wit (mid-14c.), probably a loan-translation of Anglo-Fre...
From Steve Wright on Quora, you can turn an entire phrase or sentence into a noun, and this has an unspoken effect, when suffixed with ~です, of adding up to the message, “I’m explaining this to you...
In George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language", he refers to "[t]he jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad d...
Disclaimer: I'm not a linguist and this answer is pure speculation. I think the semantics are in fact the same. If we look at the concept of existence, as humans typically evaluate things, in tha...
I knew merely the first most popular meaning of negotiate. I never knew this second legal meaning A document of an amount of money, or a title, which is readily transferable to another. Diff...
"Thing" isn't an obvious supernym for a "right". The legal definition of a "thing" is narrower than "simply anything" and it varies not just by a language, but also by jurisdiction. Any chose in ...
What semantic notions underlie any sense of 'backwardness' (like "backward" or "backwards"), with the meaning of 'backwardation' below? Etymonline overlooked this term. OED is too brusque and doesn...
An ESL student was asking about the quotation below at my school, but I don't know how to expound or simplify to her that "A problem or puzzle can be thought of as a knot." Any ideas? She knows wha...
I don't understand the "semantic progression" that I emboldened below. The steps in the "semantic progression" feel too farfetched and unconnected. Can someone please fill in, and expound, the ste...
I see that Etymonline warns of gasket's uncertain origin, but I still pine to understand this possible etymology. I know little about sailing, and Wikipedia annunciates: gaskets are lengths of r...
Kindly see the embolded phrase below. Etymonline is written too abstrusely. issue [13] The words issue and exit are closely related etymologically. Both go back ultimately to the Latin v...
The community seems positive so far. There are concerns about disrupting the main Q&A with an entirely different type of posts, but there are also concerns about if these games will have enough...
I don't understand the "semantic progression" that I emboldened. The steps in the "semantic progression" feel farfetched and unconnected to me. Can someone please fill in, and elaborate, the steps...
What did the etymons of "on by out", "on by up", "on by over" mean? Why did Old English tack and jam these different prepositions together? E.g. didn't ufan alone mean "above"? Why prefix...
Attempts to fashion a purer form of literary English can be seen in the poetry of Edmund Spenser in the 16th century and William Barnes in the 19th century. Barnes’ arguments against borrowing ...
The term 'warranty' is used to distinguish between a term (warranty) and a mere representation, and also to distinguish between terms that give no right to termination upon breach (warranties) an...
What semantic notions underlie the Latinate meanings of 'security' (quoting Etymonline first) mid-15c., "condition of being secure," from Latin securitas, from securus "free from care" (see secu...