FDP and compound words

Warren Block wblock at wonkity.com
Wed Jul 25 00:00:02 UTC 2012


The FDP word list at 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/writing-style-word-list.html 
specifies the formats for several words that are often used as a single
compound word in our documentation.  For example:

file system
disk label
mail server
name server
web server

Actually, I think the single-word versions of at least the first two are 
more correct.  Some searching found this: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_noun_and_adjective

There's an excellent example: "darkroom".  A darkroom is a different 
thing than a dark room.

To me, filesystem and disklabel are singular.  A filesystem is a thing, 
a single object, while a file system is a group of files and 
directories.  I'm sure there's a name for the
difference between the single- and double-word versions, but don't know 
it.  Many one-word versions are enshrined in code, like the use of 
"nameserver" in resolv.conf.

I propose changing the FDP recommendations for the two-word versions 
above to the single-word versions.

Statistics from SGML files in /usr/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1:

     628 "file system", 513 "filesystem"
      28 "disk label",   65 "disklabel"
      50 "mail server",   3 "mailserver"
      56 "name server",  21 "nameserver"
      74 "web server",   13 "webserver"

Some two-word instances separated by line breaks were probably missed.

After the changes to the FDP, textproc/igor can be updated to detect the 
two-word versions.


Note: no changes are planned to "cabaña de bicicletas", "Fahrradraum", 
or "Fahrradschuppen".


More information about the freebsd-doc mailing list