Two New Words

[Calilasseia]

Two words I tried in the October 15th, 2015 puzzle, that I was surprised weren't even in the rare words list, are the following, that I'm suggesting should be added thereto.

[1] Indel. A portmanteau of "insertion/deletion" (as in the insertion into, or deletion from, a DNA strand), that appears in numerous scientific papers covering such topics as genome analysis and molecular phylogeny. Indels were used to compare the relatedness of various genomes before full genome sequencing became readily available, and I have some interesting papers on this subject with respect to the comparison of human and chimpanzee genomes in my collection. Since a wide range of other terms from the scientific literature are part of the word list, I propose adding this one as well. Wikipedia covers this topic in more detail here.

[2] Inline. A term well known to those, like myself, who have a software development background. "inline" refers to program code that is directly inserted into an instruction stream, instead of being encapsulated as a procedure/function and called by that means. I suspect quite a few programmers would like to see this in the common words list, but I'l make do with the rare words list .

Some insight into the pros and cons of inline code is again covered in a Wikipedia article.

[Tom44]

There is also the inline 6 engine.  But I confess I have not heard of indel.

[Alan W]

Inline has been sitting for some time in our list of suggestions awaiting consideration. It was proposed in January last year by pat, who mentioned the programming usage and also its use in connection with roller skating.

Prodded by the renewed suggestion, I'll add inline to our words. It can be found in various dictionaries, with various meanings. It's often written with a hyphen, which is one reason why I'll put it in the rare word category.

Indel is a new suggestion, which I'll have a look at in due course.

[Calilasseia]

Might be worth considering that a word can be added to the list, if it appears in multiple scientific papers. I don't anticipate you being deluged with requests in this case, unless you have any tenured physicists, chemists or biologists playing the game.

[Alan W]

Might be worth considering that a word can be added to the list, if it appears in multiple scientific papers. I don't anticipate you being deluged with requests in this case, unless you have any tenured physicists, chemists or biologists playing the game.

Wiktionary already follows this policy, although not limiting it to scientific papers. They aim to include any word having three or more independent appearances in durable publications. Sure enough, Wiktionary does include indel, although no other general dictionary that I consulted does. In the past I've rejected bird names suggested by pat where Wiktionary was the only dictionary listing the word and the only uses of the word that I could see were in highly specialist publications. I think a similar policy should be applied here - what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the DNA sequence.

So I won't take up the suggestion of indel.