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gdavissonlast Saturday at 8:22 AM1 replyview on HN

"Grue" has a surprising variety of meanings:

Obsolete/dialiectical English: to shudder with fear, or a shudder (related to "gruesome")

Computer games: in Zork, a monster that eats adventurers in the dark [0]

Linguistics: an English translation for words that cover the entire green-blue part of the spectrum (in languages that don't distinguish blue from green) [1]

Philosophy: a color name that is equivalent to green until a specific future time, at which point it becomes equivalent to blue (used to raise questions about how to validly extrapolate into the future) [2]

[0]: https://zork.fandom.com/wiki/Grue

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction#Grue_a...


Replies

andy99last Saturday at 11:39 AM

It also means crane in French, both the construction kind and the bird. When I first saw the name I guessed there must be some relationship to cranes.

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