Just got bitten by typing “middle school pupil” as an answer for 中学生 and being marked as wrong. I’ve added that as a synonym for myself. For those who don’t know, in the UK children under university age tend to be called “pupils” over students - calling a 12 year old a ‘student’ feels weird.
I was wondering if this could be added as an accepted answer for the school pupil/student related vocab?
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You can add your own user synonyms - if you view the item’s page, you can see the meanings listed as “Primary”, “Alternate” and “User Synonyms”. Just add anything you like there and it’ll be accepted as a correct answer (provided it’s not explicitly blocked as something that’s kinda similar but is actually wrong).
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For me, calling frankly anyone a pupil feels weird. Other option would be “high schooler”.
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Middle schooler.
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Thanks, and I’ve done that too. Just posting here because it bumped my SRS and I wanted to prevent it doing the same for others. How does this sort of thing get into the content updates?
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Is there a precedent for both British and American spellings being preset in WK? It’s been a while since I’ve used it. I am pretty sure they don’t strive to have comprehensive British English coverage, but if British spelling is something WK has taken the trouble to add in the past for at least some entries, then I can imagine they would for this entry as well.
Perhaps check that first. Then, here’s the process I’ve seen for past updates:
You make a post (as you did). Then after some discussion has established you aren’t a raving lunatic (check) and what you have suggested is sensible (check), you can @ the mods and let them know middle school student (American) = middle school pupil (British) and therefore should be on the out of package accepted answer for 中学生
Mind you I have no idea if that’s how the feedback loop is intended, but I’ve seen that loop get positive responses in the past.
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To an extent, though it’s not really feasible to cover every possible regional variation.
No, but British English is also closely related to Hiberno-English, Australian English and Canadian English, so it’s pretty widely useful to have BE synonyms and while they don’t commit to adding them all, they’ve had no problems adding them in the past.
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Agreed, though feels something that could be iterative? I recognise the low priority in the grand scheme of things.
Would be interesting to see how many users from different English-speaking regions there are and if there are significant dialect variants - Australia? New Zealand? South Africa? Etc.
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There are quite a few people from those places, and if they’ve made some updates like this in the past, this entry strikes me as one that would be similarly helpful (and the related elementary school one, high school)
I’d say just go ahead and tag them and they’ll probably take care of it.
@WaniConti, I hope it’s okay to tag you in this. I would be grateful if you could have a peek at the above and see if it would be alright to add the synonym of ‘pupil’ to the student word accepted synonyms.
Totally okay to tag us! I’ll bring this up to the content team as it is a request with a slightly larger scope. We have added British spellings to words upon request so it seems like this one may get some traction!
-Nick at WK
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“Pupil” is certainly a word we know, but school students are school students.
This isn’t exactly spelling but they allow corner store as an alternative to convenience store.
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We’d tend to call that a “corner shop” where I’m from, and a liquor store is an “off license”. Why does everything British feel more quaint than cool?
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We did used to have off licenses called “Liquor Zone” though which is hilarious to me at least.
I think British spellings should all be in I moaned about favour yesterday. For reference you can look up the word in SOWPODS Scrabble dictionary which has both UK and US spellings allowed, or check a UK dictionary which usually lists both e.g. Chambers
favour or (N Amer ) favor noun
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Hi there! We looked into this suggestion and agreed that we should add the “pupil” variations to the allow list for all the student-related vocab. Thanks for sharing this with us!
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According to Google Trends, “pupil” is less popular than “school student” in Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, but in most of Europe and several other countries people seem to be learning the British version.
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This community is lovely, curious and helpful. Thanks everyone!
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North America excluding Canada… We are the neighbour (not neighbor) to the north.
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