February 23, 2026
Mind the space!
Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
Space-bar scandal: everyday phrases snubbed, commenters split on what counts as a “word”
TLDR: A word-game maker says dictionaries miss nearly 500,000 common two‑word phrases because they contain spaces. Comments split: learners want them included for clarity, skeptics call it pointless clutter, and multilinguals note German bundles phrases into single words—fueling a bigger fight over what “counts” as a word.
Word gamers lit up the comments after a dev claimed nearly half a million everyday “words with spaces” are missing because print dictionaries skip multi‑word expressions. The crowd split hard: learners cheered, saying phrases like “boiling water,” “help me,” and “Saturday night” carry real meaning; purists scoffed that dictionaries aren’t for obvious combos. One skeptic snarled that “none of those should take up space,” while a non‑native speaker begged for respect because phrases, not single words, unlock comprehension. Polyglots piled on: one user flexed German’s “just mash it together” trick—Champignoncremesuppe—while English gets stuck between spaces. Another dropped a literary mic, citing a Ted Chiang passage about how writing spaces mirror spoken pauses. And someone jokingly blamed Irish monks for inventing the gap that started all this drama. Behind the memes is a real stat bomb: Merriam‑Webster covers only a sliver of top phrases, dropping to 7% at scale, while crowd‑built Wiktionary does better but still misses tons. Fans of word games say we’re conditioned to ignore “transparent” phrases—even when they name real things. Gatekeeping or housekeeping? The thread became a showdown over whether dictionaries should be clean, or complete.
Key Points
- •Traditional dictionaries emphasize single words and largely exclude multi-word expressions, shaping perceptions of what counts as a word.
- •Coverage metrics show Merriam-Webster includes 18% of the top 10,000 MWEs (7% by 100,000); adding Wiktionary initially raises coverage to 75% but falls to 48% as terms get more obscure.
- •In selected categories, print dictionaries cover only about 2–3% of expressions, while Wiktionary covers around 30%.
- •English’s combinatorial space yields about 250 billion possible two-word combinations; roughly 15% (30 billion) are plausible, with many forming meaningful expressions.
- •An AI (Claude) generated 774,000 MWE candidates, enabling analysis across opaque compounds, phrasal verbs, named entities, and technical terms, revealing significant coverage gaps.