Words

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There are a few from tangible anthropic that you could justify transferring to tangible nonanthropic to even things out a bit more: arborvitae, floramor, and aji are kinds of plants; and horses have curples.

Interesting questions arise: are mathematical concepts like the hypercube anthropic? Is a doodsmak tangible? Presumably it is, but only to those involved.

I've now classified 200 words under the new system, and the proportions are almost exactly equal, with only a slight bias away from tangible nonanthropic, which proves to me the system's validity (I will eventually rename each list to something more evocative).

Wow! Chuffed! Looking at the ones you've classified already, I'd say we'd agree on about 90%, with most of the disagreement being on what's anthropic and what's not. For example, Ghostzapper I'd say is the result of selective breeding by humans.

Yes, now that you mention it, many of these words do have a great sound. You should consider that as an essential element with the new schema, or at least mention it in the list's description.

mollusque: thank you, thank you! That is exactly the kind of system I had in mind; I'm going to give it a shot.

whichbe: I guess most of the words I've listed - maybe 75% - are words whose sound or mouthfeel appeals to me, but there are many other reasons, too. I'm all for probing, and I did try - but I wanted a scheme which wasn't subjective - a scheme my children can continue after I am dead.

The thought of asking only "Are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?" tickles me greatly. I hope that someone, somewhere, considers these his all-governing categories.

"how fascinating the personal typology that each of us creates when faced with a mountain of data..." Indeed. My first thought on reading your comment was Radar O'Reilly's filing system in M*A*S*H. :)

*watching with interest to see what yarb decides to do with his list, if he finds the time...*

Really, this is kind of impossible for anyone other than you to do. You know the methodology (even if erratic) of why you chose what you've added. I've chopped up some of my bigger lists simply by going through half the list and mentally noting themes that start to emerge. The fact that this one is SO big makes it the challenge (as it is time consuming), not the lack of theme.

If you want to skip the "probing" stage, I would recommend you do something more wild: keeping in mind whatever you do remember about this list, even if it's all-over-the-place, write down about 10 descriptive words or phrases about the list. Then you could be a maverick and just create lists based on any of these 10 phrases that seem appealing, and start churning through the list dumping ones that fit in the right slot.

I giggled when I read mollusque's comment here, though... how fascinating the personal typology that each of us creates when faced with a mountain of data.

How about two dichotomies, tangible and intangible, and anthropic and nonanthropic?

tangible anthropic: clawbar, electrodoméstico, fusspot
tangible nonanthropic: rorqual, nipplefruit, boomslang
intangible anthropic: ebagum, tzitzimime, forkful
intangible nonanthopic: depthless, fissiparity, toothiness.

But... but... there are tags, too. So you could list things a certain way and use tags to cross-reference, no?

Oh well. I'd wait for CERN too.

Thanks for your thoughts everybody, but I still haven't found the cipher which will allow me to carve up this list to my satisfaction. It has to be something applicable equally to all parts of speech and all languages, something more interesting than alphabetical order.

I'm not that bothered about being able to locate a specific word - if I knew the word I wanted I wouldn't need to list them in the first place - but I want a way to focus my browsing. I guess my system would equally be able to describe the universe / existence itself, since that is what words represent. So I'll just wait for the Theory of Everything - the boffins at CERN should have it sorted out sometime this year.

I'd start by moving the animals and vegetables to their own lists.

You can separate them into words which are steam-driven, such as fluffy starchtastic bun of love, and the rest.

Gosh, yarb, there are a million ways. Some people (I think reesetee started it) have several "Just 'cause I like them" lists, separated into chunks of letter ranges, though if you plan to hang out on Wordie quite a long time you might start out with 26 of them just for convenience's sake (having them all in the same chunk of "Your Lists" since they all were started at once).

Some people organize them thematically according to where they learned them ("Learned on Wordie" or "Learned from George W. Bush"--okay I'm joking, no one ever learned a word from him).

Some people organize them by the type of word, or how many letters they have, or whether they're abstract or concrete nouns, etc.

And then there's me. My favorites list is all the words that don't fit on one of my other 150,000 lists. *sigh*

You could start by creating a "just for fun" list, with madeupical words and delightful phrases...

The most basic, I think, might be to separate words and phrases — Beyond that, what do you think of when you're looking for a word you've saved? Is it the part of speech, the thing it applies to, the way that you found it..? Physically organizing things to match the way I've already subconsciously ordered them has always gone well (list-making is a bit more complicated, but it's similar in effect to "intuitive tagging"). If you're looking to find things more quickly, that might be something to think about. :)

My all-purpose word list is too long. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I might reorganise it? I don't want alphabetical order. Is there some thematic structure I might apply?

OK, I get it. Cheers.

Fantastic! My favorite actual word I've seen listed here in quite some time.

Yarb, would you mind adding that comment to the word itself? It would be helpful for, you know, posterity's sake :-)

Is it a man? Is it a donkey? No! It's a worker in a ship's engine room.