Coming up on Word Matters, some questions from you.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
We all know what a word looks like.
It's a group of letters typically including a vowel or two and maybe on occasion a hyphen.
Introduce a space into the mix and you have not one word but two, right?
And yet, dictionaries, which are supposed to define individual words,
define things like bread machine, which is two words.
What is up with that?
Let us explain.
Roy has written in with question about vernacular from science fiction specifically, Time Machine.
And Roy writes, this of course is not a word per se,
but a two word phrase that is commonly understood to mean a specific thing.
And he writes,
Time Machine is in fact a single dictionary entry despite being constructed from two clearly understood words whose meanings do not change as part of the phrase,
which then got me thinking, what qualifies Time Machine, or as it happens,
pen machine for a single entry but leaves bread machine ineligible?
Excellent question.
That's a great question.