Film editing

The twenty-seventh entry is os elementos de entrega, and the English word that answers it is one Portuguese cannot build. « Deliverable » began as an ordinary adjective, meaning capable of being delivered. English then did what it does with that whole suffix: it dropped the noun and let the adjective stand on its own as a countable thing, almost always in the plural. « The deliverables are due on Friday », « one more deliverable and we are finished ». The mould is alive and the family is large — « consumables », « valuables », « renewables », « wearables », « receivables », « edibles » — and each one names the things of which the adjective is true. Portuguese owns the same suffix in -ável and declines to use it this way: os entregáveis turns up in project prose and still reads as a translation, which is why the phrase on this page says the noun out loud. Two small cautions. One of them is « a deliverable », never « a deliverables ». And the word stays silent about what the thing actually is — a file, a subtitle track, a signature — so it never replaces the name of the object.