“Worthwhile”

How do you write the word “worthwhile”?  Interestingly, it doesn’t appear in any of the Gregg dictionary versions that I have.

(by Lee for
group greggshorthand)


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11 comments Add yours
  1. Unless my memory fails me (been a while since I've written shorthand), the Anniversary brief is just u-u-th-i

    I'm not understanding what you mean about there being no way to smoothly connect th-i… It's like th-a.

  2. Right . . . I get that. I'm a DJS writer, and u-u-over ith is the brief form for "worth", but there's no brief form for "worthwhile." So I was trying to figure out how to connect "u-u-over ith" with "u-i-l".

  3. Like fiasco said, in Anniversary, it is u – u – over th – i. I think that in Simplified and later versions, there is a u after the th, so it could be u – u – over th – u – i – l. If that is the case, that's how you make a smooth connection, by inserting the u.

    I don't have a Simplified or DJS dictionary in front of me to verify.

  4. Can someone tell me where the form "u-u-over ith-i" is introduced? It's not listed anywhere as a brief form, and the word "worthwhile" isn't in any of the Gregg dictionaries. But lo and behold, last night I flipped open a Series 90 text and there it is, in one of the lessons as a "brief form derivative"–but with no explanation of why the "i" by itself can stand for "while". The form itself makes perfect sense, but somehow I managed to never encounter it before (or at least didn't remember it). And it seems more like a distinct brief form, than a derivative, since there's no principle I know of for "i" to serve as a word-ending "-while". Although the anniversary dictionary give "mn-i" for "meanwhile. Is this one of the early "abbreviating principles"?

  5. "Worthwhile" is introduced in Lesson 46 of the DJS and S90 books, in the discussion of compound words, and it is written as it is done in Anniversary: u – u – over th – i, so I stand corrected. It is also in the S90 dictionary. In Centennial Gregg, it is a brief form.

    So we don't need to worry about the linking.

  6. Thanks for tracking that information down for me. As in all things Gregg, you can't accuse them of perfect consistency. The "worthwhile" outline absolutely looks familiar to me, I just couldn't retrieve it in my brain, or find it in the books. Is it a brief form, a phrase, or a compound word? Wow.

  7. One of the reasons "worthwhile" does not appear in some dictionaries is that it was considered a phrase in Simplified and before series. In fact, the phrase "worth while" is in the Phrase Book of Gregg Shorthand Simplified, in Assignment 28, Paragraph 245 of the second edition of the Simplified Manual, Functional Method (Lesson 28, Paragraph 255 of the regular manual), and is introduced in Assignment 64, Paragraph 363 in Vol. 2 of the Anniversary Functional Method manual. However, it is not in the Anniversary or Pre-anniversary phrase books.

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