More Romps Through the Dictionary

As I've written here before, sometimes I have some pretty enlightening adventures just digging around in the dictionary -- usually because I need to know something for an article I'm editing. Here are a few of the words I’m glad to have had occasion to look up.

terrine

This one came up in the context “a terrine of soup.” I hesitated, trying to remember whether I’d seen it spelled “tureen.” Indeed I had. Webster’s New World has entries for both.

“terrine: noun. An earthenware dish or casserole in which a pâté or any of various similar meat or vegetable mixtures is cooked and served.”

“tureen: noun. A broad, deep, usually covered dish used for serving foods such as soups or stews.”

So, if we take this exact wording to heart, you can cook food in your terrine, but you can only serve it in a tureen.

chitter

Just a fun-to-know word meaning “to twitter.” Of course, that was written before the advent of the Twitter. So it’s probably lost some of its currency.

meatloaf

I came across an example of the word meatloaf” but written in the plural, meatloafs. The plural of loaf is loaves. So I wondered whether the same formula applied to meatier masses.

But that raised another question. Can meatloaf be a countable noun, like car? Or is it what we call a “mass noun,” like spaghetti, which in English is considered a mass and not a singular thing that can be multiplied into plural things (explaining why no one says, “I’m so hungry I could eat three spaghettis.”)?

Neither Webster's New World College Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Online, American Heritage via Dictionary.com nor Dictionary.com's own entry offers a plural form or any discussion of whether meatloaf can be a count noun.

Usually, any word that has an irregular plural form gets special mention in the dictionary. For example, under child you’ll see children. Similarly, under loaf Webster's tells us the plural is loaves. But it does not offer any similar notation under meatloaf. So we're left to assume one of two things: Either dictionaries aren't down with meatloaf as a count noun or it follows the same rule as every other regular noun in the dictionary, forming the plural by just adding S.

I'm still not sure what to do about this one.

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