Originally posted by NemeBro
Holy shit.That's the definition of debate, there was no definition for out debated because it's not an actual word, you use a hyphen to join two words.
I assume you know that the definition of out-debate means to beat someone in a debate more or less. Notice how none of those definitions state as much.
**** you're an idiot.
This is correct.
Quan exploited the search engine's inability to clarify some concatenated queries in it's look-up algorithm. Google's search engine is capable of that (it searches for results one way but if it finds many others under a similar search, it asks if you meant that.....). So, what dictonary.com is doing, it looks like, is returning the page entry for the last word in the search. It appears the search engine for that site uses a space as a delimiter but it does not do anything with the word before the space (at least in some results).
To test this theory, I performed another search to prove it focuses on the second word after the "space" delimiter:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Out+play?s=t
Notice the address reads "Out+play" but it returns results for "play"?
My little theory does not hold true for nonsensical combinations of words, however. If you do that, it just returns web-based* search-engine-like* results (in fact, I believe it is powered by Google):
http://ask.reference.com/web?s=t&q=brown%20poo&l=dir&qsrc=2891&ld=260:1&o=10616
Anyway, I'm bored at work. I am having to write some procedures that I don't want to write, at the moment. Waaah.
*You can bet your sweet ass that I went out of my way to create these hyphenated words because of how this whole conversation started. I did this mostly because "lol."
Edit - So let's make it clear that Quan is smart and tried to pull a fast one on NemeBro. It did not work, though.