Talk:bureau

The english audio pronunciation is incomprensible... --81.208.83.244 19:44, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Missing French IPA

I'm learning French so I occasionally come across a word without IPA and it's such a pain. I think it is important to have IPA on each word entry. It allows anyone to know both aspects of the word, meaning and pronunciation. An online multilingual dictionary with pronunciation guides is a powerful tool for anyone learning a new language. I hope that leaving a little sentence like "Missing French IPA" is going to be useful, or at least not rude or negative. In the best case, someone with knowledge of the French language could search for entries with comments in the discussion saying "Missing French IPA" and could add the pronunciation. Perhaps this could end up working a bit like some open source projects where there are sections for low hanging fruit. Simple tasks like adding pronunciation to each word could be grouped as a low hanging fruit and be made more accessible. (182.239.140.109 06:06, 20 March 2011 (UTC))

RFV discussion: October 2015–February 2016

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bureau

Definition #1 'office'. In its previous state it seemed to imply that bureau could mean "a building or room where clerical or professional duties are performed" as well as just an administrative unit of government or organization that provides information. Some of the translations are still for this meaning of "a building or room where clerical or professional duties are performed" but I have never heard bureau to mean this and I was unable to find any dictionary or citations which reflected this definition of bureau. If it does exist, then the translations are fine, but the definition needs tweaking as "office" on its own is a useless definition. Tulros (talk) 12:25, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

The previous definition gets support from “bureau”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC., so search in the 19th century and earlier might be fruitful.

Webster 1913 has, after a first def as "Originally, a desk or writing table with drawers for papers",

2. The place where such a bureau is used; an office where business requiring writing is transacted. DCDuring TALK 17:52, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm getting plenty of book cites of the sort "he/she went back/returned to the bureau". Sometimes this means returned to that employment, but there are also many that plainly show the bureau is to be considered a physical location.[1][2][3][4]. SpinningSpark 22:55, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Of the links you present, the last yields me no visible text, the third refers to a "Bureau" that is clearly referring to the name of an organization, the second fits the bill, and in the first most of those visible seem to refer to a piece of furniture, with one referring to the name of an organization. Thus, I find but one citation that should grace the definition in question. DCDuring TALK 03:02, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, you are right, they are not as good as I first thought. The one you can't read is "He returned to the bureau and opened a different drawer." A case of expectation bias I think. SpinningSpark 10:41, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

These seem like clear citations. The second citation mentioned above actually seems a little less clear, because it could mean she returned to the "news bureau", which needn't denote a physical office per se; compare "she returned to the unit with some steaming hot food". Nonetheless, for reference it is:

• 2002, Ron Steinman, Inside Television's First War: A Saigon Journal, page 237:

  Within an hour, she returned to the bureau with steaming food, our only meal of the day.

I think this is cited. - -sche (discuss) 08:22, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

RFV-passed. - -sche (discuss) 03:27, 4 February 2016 (UTC)