Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of three-letter English words

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep, no consensus. SushiGeek 08:39, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of three-letter English words

Words fail me. "Why?" is about the best I can do. kingboyk 02:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

~~weak keep~~. hey, why not? ;-) Seems to have been a vfd a couple years ago, which it survived 17k/32d according to the talk page. Can't seem to find it in the archives, though . . . --He:ah? 02:35, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Why not? WP:NOT a collection of indiscriminate information? Because some of them aren't even English words? Because it serves no useful purpose? With regards to the previous nomination I think in the old days they just got discussed on the Talk pages (?), so for the record the article has a previous nomination. --kingboyk 02:42, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
While this is in no way a collection of academic or normally useful information, you never know when someone could use a list like this to, say, do something for school in 5th grade or brush up on their scrabble skills. With that said, i'm changing my vote to weakly neutral; on closer inspection, as you point out, it is NOT a list of three letter english words, but rather three letter combinations of letters that are theoretically possible to pronounce as a word, suffixes and prefixes from other languages like "psi", non-words such as c02 (which is a redlink as C-zero-two rather than CO2) . . . So i'll leave it up to the rest of you. --He:ah? 03:03, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep. I'm afraid you're going to have to provide more of a rationale than that for an article which has been around since November 2004 and has approximately 100 edits, particularly since lists also exist for one-letter English words and two-letter English words. See also Three-letter vowel-less English word. I'm not a big fan of these collections myself, but we need to think carefully about our deletion criteria before we start in on these. --Saforrest 02:39, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Words fail me because the concept is just so appalling bad. If you want to keep it because I can't explain quite how bad the article is, fine, but maybe have a think about's what best for Wikipedia? --kingboyk 02:43, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've reviewed the other articles you mention (with a view to nominating them) but none are quite so bad. They are shorter, provide some commentary and a little context. --kingboyk 02:46, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- - I see what you're saying. I think it's useful to distinguish accepting the article in its current form from accepting the idea of an article called List of three-letter English words, as you seem to have done above. --Saforrest 03:18, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    - Thanks for coming back to discuss this. I'm nominating the article as it stands and as I see it with little prospect of improvement into a useful encyclopedic article. Of course if it were to be massively cleaned up whilst the debate is in progress (and perhaps given a new name, as it wouldn't be just a context-free list) I may well reconsider. For now I have it firmly in the class "listcruft". Hope that helps explain my nomination and position. --kingboyk 03:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per Kingboyk. Royboy crashfan 02:44, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Handy for Xwords but otherwise useless--Light current 03:26, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete WP:NOT and wouldn't end up going to anything more than a dicdef ⇒ SWATJester ^Ready Aim _Fire! 04:24, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep it's certainly in my paper encyclopedia, and therefore "encyclopedic" by definition. Not sure about some of the words that folks have added over time, but that's a vandalism issue, not an AfD issue. --William Allen Simpson 04:32, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, Wikipedia is not a dictionary, per nom. --Ter e nc e Ong 05:27, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. WP is not paper. We do keep word lists. -- User:Docu
Delete If I went through the OED, this list would contain over a ~~hundred~~ five thousand words. T K E 06:16, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, this list is of too little use and is in danger of becoming too large. JIP | Talk
Transwiki to wiktionary, if they want it. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-04-09 08:42Z

They don't. savidan^{(talk) (e@)} 09:08, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. No better or worse than other lists. Not in danger of becoming too large - in Scrabble the three-letter word list is no greater than 1000 entries. Were do you stop? Four-letter is in the thousands - I'd say there. Outriggr 08:51, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Why? Not ego. Bad fad. Sly moo, thy oaf. Boo. savidan^{(talk) (e@)} 09:08, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as unencyclopedic. I cannot imagine any other encyclopedia having such a list and not because of space limitations. -- Kjkolb 09:44, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Strong keep Man, how sad! Not bad, all are top... well, I give up on trying to write in three-letter words (because there isn't one for "article") but this, along with One-letter English words and List of two-letter English words, is a useful and comprehensive resource, more than just a random collection of information. (Any foreign words or mistakes should be dealt with with edits, not deletion.) ProhibitOnions 10:49, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm confused. Can someone explain why we need this list? (i.e. why it is not 'listcruft'?) Once that's clear to me I'll happily change my opinion to keep but for now, it's a hard to maintain list of questionable usefulness. I'm not seeing the HARM in having it but not the usefulness either. For now: Delete ++Lar: t/c 13:30, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and edit out the non-English and nonsense words. It's stuff like this that makes Wikipedia cool and different. I don't think it's harming anything, and it's not too long. It's no less worthy than many other lists. (I'd stop here too; no four-letter word list.) --Fang Aili ^說嗎? 13:49, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Mind the WP:BEANS :) Stifle (talk) 23:28, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep This really isn't up to the point of indiscriminate and really, is listcruft hurting wikipedia? Not much, if at all. Kotepho 15:29, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Especially given the Three letter rule I think that this list is unencyclopedic, being a fairly indiscriminate collection of information, in a way in which One-letter English words, List of two-letter English words and Three-letter vowel-less English word are not, as they give exceptions to general rules and provide context on the lists, in a way in which the three letter list doesn't and couldn't as far as I can see. --G Rutter 17:19, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep. Useful if we ever get around to writing the mad ape den^[1] article. · rodii · 18:16, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
keep and please remove nonsense words Yuckfoo 06:40, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete a random and indiscriminate collection of words that happen to have three letters. Something like this would normally lead to cries of listcruft. MLA 08:42, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep it's hardly random and it has clearly delineated criteria for inclusion/exclusion, all in all a good list with a long pedigree. Carlossuarez46 21:32, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Transwiki to Wiktionary. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information or words. See also WP:LC. Stifle (talk) 23:28, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep and make the content fit the title. Ardric47 01:15, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete and replace with a List of Four-letter Words begining in C and ending in p. Avalon 00:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Not encyclopaedic. How long it has been around is irrelevant. Martinp 04:22, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Not encyclopaedic. May be served by the corresponding category in wiktionary. `'mikka (t) 01:55, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.