Learn something new every day.

[the_narration]

The American Heritage Dictionary swears that the past tense of the colloquial verb for of "out" is spelled with only one T. I totally would have figured two.

(I needed to know for a story I'm writing, and Microsoft Word doesn't believe it's a word.)

Comments

[miniglik]

Could it be one of those words that's correct both ways?

(This reply mostly just to tell you I've put Noir and Cowboy Bebop \on my Netflix queue. No money spent, and hopefully I'll be able to like Ghost in the Shell later.)

[the_narration]

No, actually, now that I think about it one T makes sense. When it's vowel-constanant at the end of a word then you double the constanant when adding a suffix (i.e. "setting", "petted") but when it's vowel-vowel-constanant you don't have to (i.e. "boating", "gloated"). I was just pleasantly surprised to find it in the dictionary at all: it's really more of a slang expression, and spellcheck swears up and down that it's not a word at all.

(Cool. I think those might be more to your taste. Noir takes a little while to build up steam, but it's very emotional, as opposed to GITS which is more about the ideas and perhaps a bit of an acquired taste.)

[tsubaki_ny]

"Outed"? Just one.

[the_narration]

*nods* I might have had to ask your professional opinion if it wasn't for online dictionaries. Both the dead-tree dictionary and spellcheck swear that there's no such word.

(Might post the story in question by tomorrow. It went really quickly--six pages in about as many days of writing in my spare time at work--and I wasn't going to give it more than a cursory edit.)

See: Conjugating an adverb

[tackdriver56]

I suspect the reason it's not in the dictionaries is that it's an improper colloquial use of 'out' as a verb. (to reveal one's sexual preference).

Traditionally, 'out' is an adverb, and we conjugate the associated verb, instead: "Anne Heche came out (of the closet)". The fact that we do hear "X outed Y" don't make it gud hinglish.

Solution: if you must use 'outed', and you want Word to stop complaining about it, right click on the word when it's underlined by Spell Check, and select "Add to dictionary". Le Voila!

BTW, the LJ spell checker doesn't like my use of the singular possessive "one's".

Re: See: Conjugating an adverb

[the_narration]

All true. Really, I was surprised to find it in the online dictionary at all, since it's a colloquialism. But then, language is a living, dynamic thing that changes constantly: "access" didn't used to be a verb, for example. And that online dictionary is actually pretty thorough in getting all the common uses of a word, including the slang expressions.

A spellcheck program can sometimes be more trouble than help when you're writing fiction, since you're imitating how people talk and that may not match up to the program's parameters of "correctness". (You get real sick of seeing "Fragment (consider revising)" in the pop-up...) Whether or not something is a word, if a character is saying or thinking it, I'll still need to know how to spell it.

(I've found LJ's spellcheck to be particularly limited in the past, so it choking on "one's" doesn't surprise me.)