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by BigTTYGothGF 27 days ago
> "pumpkin"--that is "squash", so there are some localisation improvements which could be made to improve British and American English use

That's a much bigger issue than just wording differences. As an American, there's several different squashes in common use of which pumpkin is only one. (acorn, butternut, and spaghetti are the ones I'm thinking of; zucchini if you want to be pedantic).

2 comments

Agreed. My comment was to highlight that if a recipe for a soup just says "1kg squash", that could mean anything from "Cucurbita maxima subsp. maxima var. Jarrahdale"[1] through to "Cucurbita pepo subsp. pepo var. recticollis"[2], with vastly different outcomes for the soup.

The model under the hood should probably have ingredients as parts of a taxon, then have common names mapped (many:many) to these parts of taxons. Then it's necessary to have abstract classifications such as "pumpkin seed" which could be defined as the seed of multiple different taxons, which for some recipes, may not matter which one of 5 Cucurbita subspecies is used. That way if someone types "squash" or "pumpkin seed" they get asked to clarify what they mean, which will change quite a bit depending on locality of the person being asked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarrahdale_pumpkin

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straightneck_squash

In BrE too, not sure why that was related to regional difference if they're called pumpkins there too.