Is "Frauded" a word?

As above - using social media as a corpus - you can see the increase of frauded over time. It’s certainly not common in all contexts and age groups, but it’s seeing increasing usage among 18-24 year olds and most commonly in American English.

So it’s conjecture/guesswork basically? Or there’s data to support it?

A quick google Trend search has this to say:

https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=defrauded,frauded,defraud

Basically; “Defraud” is the most common, then Defrauded, then Frauded. Frauded is searched for about 50% of the frequency that Defrauded is, but there’s fluctuation month to month.

Interestingly, this chart suggests it’s only people in England searching for Frauded (red bar)

It depends what you define as data - Twitter no longer allow use their tweets to be used for educational purposes so there’s no public corpus available for a quick and easy comparison.

A quick Twitter search shows “frauded” appears 14 times in the last 12 hours.

Roughly the same number of uses of “defrauded” occur in the last hour.

Obviously that’s not statistically reliable(!) but 12:1 suggests a fairly common use.

And! If you do the same thing but world wide, instead of just UK, it seems that Canada has the biggest interest in the term Frauded.

Partially driven by “Frauded by TLC” which is apparently trending.

Let’s not grill Dan too much here! He’s not, I think, defending the use of the word. Just talking about etymological and lexicographic evolution.

Yeah that’s not what lexographic data looks like. This doesn’t tell you either how common it is or whether it’s usage is increasing.

Paint me as the skeptic here. You say it’s increasing, but as far as I can tell you’ve no reliable evidence to convince me with.

This is what lexicographers and dictionaries are for. They do this work so we don’t have to. It’s not in the dictionary and that tells me it’s not yet in common usage according to professional lexicographers.

(Just to be clear re Peters grilling comment, I consider this a friendly conversation and quite interesting for a Sunday morning, I hope that’s how it comes across)

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They persuaded far too many to go chasing waterfalls

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Definitely agree - it’s just a rough indicator but lexicological data doesn’t always work in the way you suggest.

For example when the OED is listing usages of a word they aren’t looking for how common a word is at the time, but simply looking for use. So if you’re looking at the etymology of the word and the first cited example is 1350 - that doesn’t mean it was standard in the language at that time but that it’s just the first recorded, written, example of the word that they’ve found.

It’s why I get frustrated with myths like “Shakespeare invented more words than any other writer” - he didn’t. He just happens to have more of his word surviving than any other writer of his era and so citations of his work are more common than other writers. We have no way of knowing whether he ‘invented’ the word or just picked it up down the pub with his mates :crazy_face:

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This is an interesting point.

Personally, I like to think of that “first recorded use” as being a threshold whereby a word becomes fully adopted. Cleary, trailblazers will have used it for probably some time already - but that is the start of it (potentially) entering wider use.

You must have “reached this threshold”, if you like, to get noticed by dictionary authors, etc. That means it won’t just be a word made up last week, it will be one which has already (to an extent) been organically adopted.

The thing about Twitter is it allows us to see this early adoption happening in more real time, and also potentially blurs the boundaries between different versions of English (leading to a more homogeneous version over time, potentially).

This is just like the old days. Fun and frolics - all friends and a jolly good time being had by all :grinning::heart_eyes:.

A proper weekend thread :ok_hand:

In terms of historical words sure, but in terms of adding new words it’s all data based. They analyse corpus data to decide how words are being used and how frequently.

Absolutely! A great topic for a Sunday.

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You see, I was clear in my mind…

Then, just as in Tony Hancock’s “Twelve Angry Men”…:thinking:

I don’t know now…:smirk:

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To go through the options…

Frauded does sound so so wrong, but it’s fairly unambiguous what’s meant.

In my head, Defrauded, normally relates to a person or entity that’s been cheated rather than an object, IE someone defrauds me, or defrauds the bank… but they don’t defraud my card.

To say in that sentence, “unless you’ve been a victim of fraud”, would be technically incorrect. As being a victim of fraud would only entitle you to a free card, if the card itself were compromised in some way as apart of that fraud (I assume).

How about, “or it has been used fraudulently.”

Talking about evolution of the language, has anyone else found themselves / noticed others leaving off the verb “to be”?

So instead of “I’m keen to go” you might write “keen to go”.

Definitely feels like a bit of a shift happening…

Can you card be used fraudulently without you being the victim or the perpetrator?

I think this would work well in that particular sentence, but it may be seen as too long?

Mostly yes - but there are no specific rules on how common a word has to be for it to be added to the dictionary!

There’s some explanation of the process for the OED here: https://public.oed.com/how-words-enter-the-oed/

As an example “code red” was added to the OED in September, but their first citation was 1957. Words which are jargon aren’t added to the OED, so I can only assume that it wasn’t added until it became used outside of a military context. Is September 2020 really the first time that we can say that code red is widely understood outside of the military? Surely Aaron Sorkin had something to do with it? :face_with_monocle:

I don’t think that’s a shift. Elision of the verb to be has always been common in speech.