sevenish

[birdy]

It wasn't allowed in Sunday's puzzle.  I don't know about other places, but I certainly arrange to meet friends at approximately [number]ish, rather than an exact time.

[rogue_mother]

Birdy, I got shot down by this one! It certainly has wide colloquial usage, but one is hard put to find a dictionary entry other than as the example (or one of the examples) for colloquial use of the suffix -ish. I'm a prolific user of -ish myself, but I'm not certain just how many  -ish words are actually in the dictionary.

[Alan W]

There are circumstances where a word that is not in any dictionary can be acceptable in Chihuahua. One such circumstance is where the word is the product of a recognised construction rule. I think this is the case with sevenish and similar words.

The Shorter Oxford's entry for the suffix -ish includes this:

(d) colloq. from names of hours of the day or numbers of years, w. the sense 'round about, somewhere near (the time or period of)', as elevenish, fortyish.

Other dictionaries have similar descriptions, some giving sevenish as an example. So I think sevenish is definitely accepted by the dictionaries as a word, even though none of them seems to have an actual entry for it. And it certainly is in fairly frequent use, in books as well as in conversation.

So I think sevenish should be allowed, birdy, but this raises the question: what about sixish, eightish and all the other "[number]ish" words? If I'm going to allow one of the words in this category, I feel all of them should be admitted. It would be too confusing otherwise. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about compound words or words longer than nine letters, so it's basically most of the numbers from oneish to twelvish, and most of the multiples of ten from twentyish to ninetyish. (Quite a few of these will probably never come up in a puzzle, but I would like to include them all in the word list for consistency.)

With regard to the general topic of -ish words, that RM raises, I think I'll leave that can of worms for another day.

[birdy]

Thank you, Alan!

[rogue_mother]

Alan,

Some time after this discussion, you added oneish through twelvish to the word list. I have discovered a related word which is currently disallowed but probably should also be included, namely noonish. One needs go no further than our own forum to find examples of this usage.

[Alan W]

I think the same reasoning applies as for the numbers, RM.

I saw hundreds of usage examples in Google Book Search. At first it puzzled me that the first few were from works with titles like the Oxford Handbook of Epistemology, where passages like this appeared: "The complication is that no one may be in a position to exclude the existential generalization that there are further sharpenings of 'noonish'." But then I realised that these writings had been brought to the top of the list because they used the word noonish multiple times, as an example of how language deals with approximation, or something. The bulk of the examples were from less esoteric books, where the word would pop up once or twice.

I have a feeling that people in Britain and Australia tend to use midday or twelve o'clock to refer to that time of day, rather than noon, so perhaps we would be less likely to use noonish than an American would. Nevertheless, it doesn't sound strange to me, and its meaning is of course instantly clear.

So I will add the word to our list ... soonish.

[Alonzo Quixote]

Alan, you ended your reply with an interesting rhyme of  noonish,  namely  soonish.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary has a listing for  soonish.

Therefore, I am wondering whether  soonish  might be considered for inclusion as well.