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times

(n): a more or less definite period of time now or previously present
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about 17 hours ago qroqqa said:

The verb 'times' is so common that I suspect it's now the normal word for the thing amongst—what shall we call non-mathematicians?—Loggles. "Multiply it by" only outnumbers "times it by" by 4 to 1 on Google. The inflected forms 'timesing' and 'timesed' are very rare there, but possibly that reflects the contexts it's actually used in: people say, 'Times it by 2' or 'You need to times it by 2', but don't much describe doing it in the past or repeatedly.

10 months ago chained_bear said:

I had to edit a piece recently which used the following phrase: "the sevens-times table." I kept changing it--the seven times-table, the seven times table, anything, but the writer kept changing it back. I'm not even sure what it should have read, but the way it was written bugs me. Still. And the thing's gone to print. *ugh*

I realize that's not exactly what we're talking about here...

10 months ago skipvia said:

Kad, ask her about subtraction. When I taught K-12, many kids used "minus" in the same way--to find the answer, you minus the first number from the second.

10 months ago chained_bear said:

aaaaagh!! aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!

10 months ago kad said:

One of my pet peeves is when someone says 'you times the first number by the second' instead of 'you multiply the the first number by the second.' Much to my chagrin, one of the *graduate students* in a class I'm teaching said this today. I think I have to fail her.

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first listed by:
tomsteele (316 words)
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