• EleventhHour
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    827 days ago

    it’s the word “finite” with de- in the beginning and -ly at the end. That’s how I remember.

      • @Dabundis
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        67 days ago

        Also helps to think of the word “definitely” as meaning “by definition”

        • @kn33
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          27 days ago

          That helps, but it doesn’t help me remember if it’s “definitely”, “definitley”, or “definitly”.

    • @[email protected]
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      157 days ago

      It’s not like this superficially either. That’s literally what the word is.

      finite - to have a limit, be bounded

      The de- part is acting like it does in words like defraud. It’s not a negative, like you might see in detox, where it means to remove something or undo something. Instead, it simply insists something has been done, not unlike the suffix -ify. You’ve been defrauded. In a manner of speaking, you could say you’ve been “fraud-ified”.

      You could say something that has been defined has been “finite-ified”. The possibilities of what it could be were limitless, but you restricted them to something specific. You’ve made it finite. You’ve defined it. It is definite.

    • @[email protected]
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      37 days ago

      I always told people “definitely is spelled like infinitely, so just remember how to spell infinite”

      But I suppose “finite” is even better than “infinite” since there’s less to remember.

      • skulblaka
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        27 days ago

        It’s more that finite is easier because it has the long I sound at the beginning which clearly designates it as I. The short i sound in most English dialects is a middling kind of “ehh” sound that can be confused for an e a lot when sounding out a word. When I misspell definitely it’s because I spell it defenitely.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 days ago

          My reasoning for why “infinite” would be easy to remember is because “infinity” is notably a word with only i as a main vowel (excluding the y)

          But I see what you mean too

          • @Benaaasaaas
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            27 days ago

            My reasoning is that infinite is pronounced like definite, unlike finite which is pronounced nothing like definite.