{"id":778,"date":"2019-03-04T15:38:35","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T20:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/?p=778"},"modified":"2022-11-03T00:06:27","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T04:06:27","slug":"ok-google-urbanism-is-a-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/ok-google-urbanism-is-a-word\/","title":{"rendered":"OK Google: Urbanism is a word"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I wrote someone an email recently, and in it I used the word “urbanism.” To my surprise, Gmail spellcheck underlined that word in red.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I tried other varieties. “Urban” does not get underlined. “Urbanization” is also OK. Even “urbanity” is in Google’s dictionary! So why is “urbanism” left out? “Urban” has been a Latin root word for anything related to cities for centuries<\/a>. Tufts has a greatly detailed Latin dictionary<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Odeon of Domitian, Ancient Rome.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What forces are at work here? I have a feeling that the answer is prosaic and disappointing. The answer may lie with how online spellcheckers work. My understanding is this: large online databases store lists of every known English word on their servers. Here’s Oracle’s (and an excerpt below):<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

urb
urban
urbane
urbanely
urbaner
urbanest
urbanise
urbanism
urbanist
urbanite
urbanity
urbanize
urbia
urbias
urbs<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Companies like Google can tap into that text, and use Java or Javascript to check a user’s input text against that list at the speed of the internet.  Google had its own attempt at a dictionary database called Google Dictionary, but it was discontinued in 2011. It was preserved in its unfinished state at this website<\/a>. I typed in “urbanization” and got a hit. But then I typed in “urbanism” and got nothing!<\/p>\n\n\n
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WordPress also doesn’t recognize “urbanism” as a word, perhaps because it piggybacks its spellcheckers onto Google’s. Could Google have left some words behind when it migrated its database of English words in 2011? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One final note. The great irony is that Google’s parent company Alphabet has an urban planning subsidiary called Sidewalk Labs<\/a>. Their well-publicized foray into using data to plan better cities already has a pilot project underway in Toronto, partnering with Thomas Heatherwick, Sn\u00f8hetta, and other huge names in architecture & planning. Maybe it’s time for the leading innovators in urbanism to expand their vocabulary. I mean that in the most literal, least sarcastic way possible. <\/p>\n\n\n
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I wrote someone an email recently, and in it I used the word “urbanism.” To my surprise, Gmail spellcheck underlined that word in red. I tried other varieties. “Urban” does not get underlined. “Urbanization” is also OK. Even “urbanity” is in Google’s dictionary! So why is “urbanism” left out? “Urban” has been a Latin root…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[529],"tags":[371,540,538,541,539],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-urbanism","tag-google","tag-sidewalk-labs","tag-spell-check","tag-urbanism","tag-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1719,"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/1719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ivanhimanen.com\/crisesofdocumentation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}