A few weeks ago player kennje made a word suggestion in the Chinwag discussion panel beside the puzzles. As I said yesterday in answering a similar request, that is not the best place to make such a suggestion, because I might not see it. But as it happens I did see it, so I'll respond.
Kennje wrote:
sortal is a word. We use it in philosophy and it's in online dictionaries and there is an entry in wikipedia and the Blackwell dictionary of philosophy.
Sortal is indeed in online dictionaries, including Oxford, Collins and Wiktionary. It can be an adjective or a noun. It's evidently a technical concept in linguistics and philosophy, and I didn't see any examples of its use outside scholarly publications, but it qualifies as a rare word for Chihuahua, and will be accepted in future.
The word's meaning is hard to grasp (for me) from a dictionary definition. The earliest citation in the OED is from John Locke, who may have coined the word. In
An essay concerning humane understanding (1690), he wrote:
That abstract Idea, which the General, or Sortal (if I may have leave so to call it from Sort, as I do General from Genus) Name stands for.
Following on from Locke, the OED defines the word as simply, "Of or belonging to a particular sort or kind. Also as
n." But this OED entry has not been updated for a long time. The online Oxford has a more complex definition:
Denoting or relating to a term representing a semantic feature that applies to an entity, classifying it as being of a particular kind.
And the noun is defined as "A count noun, for example novel as opposed to fiction."
(I notice that Locke's suggestion of
general as an adjective from
genus didn't catch on -
generic is the term used today.)
