User talk:83.181.118.153

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We hope you enjoy your time here on Wikipedia and that you choose to become a Wikipedian by creating an account. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have on my talk page. By the way, make sure to sign your posts and comments with ~~~~, which will let others know who left it. Mushroom (Talk) 06:52, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reference Desk question

Hey Oli. First of all, it's a lot easier to contact you if you sign your comments correctly. Just add four tildes (like this -> ~~~~) to the end of your message like everyone else does.

About your question... I understand what you are looking for, but there's no real answer I can give you. Most (all?) English words were not created combining the meanings of two words. Hope may mean something similar to pessimism and optimism, but it is not exactly pessimism + optimism, and any other word you try to define that way would be equally iffy.

I could tell you that forgiveness = to admit + tenderness, but that's just my interpretation, and someone else would think it's different.

Other languages, like Chinese and Japanese, have many words that could be easily thought of as Word1 + Word2 = Word3, because single words are often created out of roots of 2 other words. One simple example is the word 勉強 (ben-kyou), which is a combination of the characters 勉 (ben) meaning something like "effort" or "diligence", and 強 (kyou) meaning "hard" or "strong".

Unfortunately there are no concrete solutions to finding words like these in English, but portmanteau are pretty close, so why don't you look up those kinds of words?  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  03:31, 20 April 2006 (UTC)