[Ubuntu-l10n-eng] [Bug 406626] Re: Deleted Items Folder inconsistently named

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of
samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources,
designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the
later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written.
<http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/>

Unfortunately, the BNC Web site's search function does not seem to
distinguish between parts of speech. For example,
<http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=trash> returns 219 occurrences of
"trash", but these are a mixture of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

Fortunately, the BNC is collated at <http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/bnc-readme.html>, where parts of speech are distinguished. Using the "all.al.gz" list <http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/BNClists/all.al.gz>, we find:
* 1 occurrence of "rubbish-bin"
* 9 occurrences of "wastebasket"
* 14 occurrences of "wastebin" (and 1 of "wastebins")
* 150 occurrences of "trash" as a noun, plus 49 more where it was unclear whether it was being used as a noun, a proper noun, or a verb.

The collated list does not include non-hyphenated phrases, but going
back to the main BNC Web site we can see that "rubbish bin" occurs 42
times in the corpus <http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=rubbish+bin>, and
"recycle bin" doesn't occur at all
<http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=recycle+bin>. ("Deleted items" is, as
expected, completely absent too.)

>From this I conclude that "trash" is, in UK English, far and away more
common than "rubbish bin", "wastebin", or "wastebasket".

-- 
Deleted Items Folder inconsistently named
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/406626
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