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What does "randomically" mean?

English Language & Usage Asked on January 20, 2021

I’ve just read the O’Reilly book Getting Started with Storm and encoutered the word randomically. I highly suspect this is a made up word, but a quick google found it in use here, here, and here. Is this some obscure technical term perhaps? Or is it a case of a covergent devolution of English?

I don’t think this is a misspelling, as they (authors of the book) use the word randomly in a previous sentence (emphasis mine):

Shuffle Grouping is the most commonly used grouping. It takes a single parameter (the
source component) and sends each tuple emitted by the source to a randomly chosen
bolt warranting that each consumer will receive the same number of tuples.

The shuffle grouping is useful for doing atomic operations such as a math operation.
However, if the operation can’t be randomically distributed, such as the example in
Chapter 2 where you needed to count words, you should consider the use of other
grouping.

Did they intend it to mean something else? If so, what is that other meaning?

4 Answers

Where the authors of the book wrote randomically, they meant randomly and in fact intended to write randomly. This is demonstrably true.

  1. Randomically is not a word known to specialists and having a technical meaning (even an obscure one), because nobody is using it in published works – it is not found anywhere in the Google Books corpus (see: Google Ngram Viewer), nor has any lexicographer discovered the word and included it in a dictionary (see: OneLook).

  2. It is not a term coined by the authors of the book, or they would have defined it.

  3. The one place where it is used in the book (in Chapter 3 – see the excerpt in the question) refers to an example in Chapter 2, but there the example is described “in randomly distributed fashion”.

  4. Jonathan Leibiusky (co-author) and one of the editors at O’Reilly have just sent me a nice thank-you note for reporting the error.

Correct answer by MetaEd on January 20, 2021

Based on the 66 results on Google Books, this is simply a misspelling made by – and this is an educated guess – non-native speakers of English. The candidates on the first couple of pages of the ~15000 results that randomically returns on Google are also of a similar nature. The authors of the book that you're reading fall into the same category.

So, no, it’s not an obscure technical term. It’s also not devolution of English. It’s just a relatively obscure misspelling.

Answered by coleopterist on January 20, 2021

I have never heard this word before. I suspect it is simply an error, and that the writers meant randomly. I couldn’t find anything that defined it, and in the examples you gave, they appeared to mean randomly.

If someone else on here is aware of a technical definition for this word, I’ll gladly yield.

Answered by Jay on January 20, 2021

By the phrase “the operation can’t be randomically distributed”, the authors of Getting Started with Storm are saying that a procedure based on randomness is unsuitable. In the first paragraph you quoted they point out that Shuffle Grouping uses randomness to allocate jobs; in the second, they say that jobs for an earlier example, word counting, cannot be distributed on a random basis.

The authors may have a valid basis for the distinction they attempt to make, but randomically is something of a clumsy nonce word rather than a distinguished addition to the language. As for your links to previous occurrences of the word, all three of them appear to have been written by persons not highly skilled in English:

  • In the first link, “First, let's create a table to performance some tests” and “This code didn't work with me” are telling signs.
  • In the second link, “If I start it manually, it boot fine … it only show the log of the guests that boot” is indicative.
  • In the third link, “This happen to some EMAILs but not to others … Proceeding again in the same way I, finally, send the email”.

That is, those links don’t support randomically as a valid and useful construction.

Answered by James Waldby - jwpat7 on January 20, 2021

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