Tag Archives: Vocabulary

The Great Crossword Debate: Overused Vs. Obscure

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exercise-brain-crossword-670x335

Making a great crossword puzzle is not easy. Heck, making a GOOD crossword puzzle is not easy.

You want the theme to be creative, innovative even, but still something that can be intuited from a clever title and crafty clues.

You want the clues to be engaging, challenging, funny, tricky, and loaded with wordplay and personality.

And you want the grid fill to be fresh and interesting, yet accessible. You want to avoid obscurities, abbreviations, nonsensical partial-phrases, and the dreaded Naticks where two difficult entries cross.

But you also want to add to the lexicon of grid fill, leaving behind the tired vowel-heavy words that have become cliche or crosswordese.

Even if you accomplish all that, you also want your puzzle to have an overall consistent level of difficulty. Having a bunch of easy words in the grid only highlights the hard words necessitated when you construct yourself into a corner. A sudden spike in vocabulary and eccentricity is always noticeable.

So completing every grid becomes a balancing act between new and old, pop culture-loaded and traditional, obscure and overused.

This raises the question posed in a Reddit thread recently:

Which bothers you more, words that you probably wouldn’t know without a dictionary OR filling out OLEO and ARIA for the millionth time?

Both options had their proponents, so I’d like to give you my thoughts on each side of this cruciverbalist coin.

obscure_language

Obscure Over Overused

A well-constructed grid can overcome the occasional obscure entry. After all, since you have Across and Down entries, several accessible Across answers can hand you a difficult Down answer that you didn’t know.

You can assist with an informative clue. It might get a little lengthy, but like a well-written trivia question, you can often provide enough context to get somebody in the ballpark, even if they don’t know the exact word or phrase they need. If it FEELS fair, I think solvers will forgive some peculiar entries, as long as you don’t go overboard.

Also, if you’re a crossword fan, you’re probably a word nerd, and who doesn’t like learning new words?

As one contributor to the thread said, “I’d rather eke out a solution than fill in EKE OUT or EKE BY again.”

News-Keep-Calm-and-Carry-This-Overused-Phrase-to-the-Grave-for-College-Students

Overused Over Obscure

The very nature of crosswords demands letter arrangements that are conducive to building tight grids. Your vowel-heavy entries, your alternating consonant-vowel ABAB patterns, the occasional all-consonants abbreviation or all-vowels exhalation or size measurement… these are necessary evils.

But that doesn’t mean the cluing has to be boring. I absolutely love it when a constructor finds a new twist on an entry you’ve seen a billion times. I laughed out loud when Patti Varol clued EWE as “Baa nana?” because it was a take I’d never seen before.

Here are a few more examples of really smart ways I’ve seen overused entries clued:

  • “It’s never been the capital of England (and it surely won’t be now)” for EURO (Steve Faiella)
  • “Name-dropper’s abbr.” for ETAL (Patrick Berry)
  • “It’s three before November” for KILO (Andy Kravis)
  • “Fix plot holes, maybe” for HOE (Peter Gordon)
  • “50/50, e.g.” for ONE (Michael Shteyman). This one really plays with your expectations.
  • “Hawaiian beach ball?” for LUAU (George Barany)

Still, this is no excuse for going incredibly obtuse with your cluing just to be different. Making an esoteric reference just to avoid saying “Sandwich cookie” for OREO might be more annoying to a solver than just the overused answer itself.

On the flip side, you can treat them as gimmes, cluing them with familiar phrasing and letting them serve as the jumping-off points for longer, more difficult entries or the themed entries the puzzle is constructed around. Some familiar words are always welcome, particularly if a solver is feeling daunted with a particular puzzle’s or day’s standard difficulty.

(One poster even suggested pre-populating the grid with common crosswordese like OLEO, kinda like the set numbers in a Sudoku. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that approach before.)

conman1112

So, have we come to any conclusions today? Probably not.

As I said before, it’s a tightrope every constructor must walk on the way to finishing a crossword. Every constructor has a different method for getting across, a different formula for success. Some even manage to make it look effortless.

What do you think, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Do you favor overused entries or obscure ones? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!

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The Hunt for New Crossword-Friendly Vocabulary!

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crossword1

Epee. Etui. Acai. Amie. Anoa. Oleo. Iota.

We’ve seen a lot of curious words in crosswords over the years. Some of them are blips on the radar, appearing for a bit then vanishing without a trace. Others become part of the fabric of crosswords, forever synonymous with those enigmatic black-and-white grids under the banner of “crosswordese.”

It does make me wonder, though. What words haven’t we seen yet? What curious combinations of vowels and consonants await solvers in the future? Will they be blips or will they be the stuff of legends?

So I decided to try out different words that were either heavy on vowels or had strange letter patterns to see which ones had appeared in The New York Times crossword and when, according to the database on XWordInfo. And I turned up some curious results.

COOEE hasn’t appeared since April 1996. FLYBY hasn’t been in since 2007. QWERTY has only appeared twice, and not in almost a decade.

And yet, equally strange words like VORPAL and CRWTH haven’t appeared at all.

It’s hard to predict what odd vocabulary will strike a chord with constructors.

obiwanobi

I mean, sure, there’s a whiff of disdain surrounding crosswordese, but surely as former obscurities become more familiar, crosswordese must evolve and move forward as well. What will be the new crosswordese?

It’s not like we’re going to have new rivers, mountains, bays, or other geographical areas, for the most part. (True, the Aral Sea is pretty much the Aralkum Desert now, but that hasn’t stopped constructors from continuing to reference it.)

But I’m getting off-topic. Where would we find this new potential grid fill?

There are some delightful nuggets of linguistic oddness lurking in old dictionaries that have promise as part of a new generation of crosswordese. I mean, ECHO and OCHO are all well and good, but what about OCHE?

That’s the line behind which a darts player must stand, by the way. Zero hits in XWordInfo.

You need peculiar letter combinations to help fill your grid? How about BADAUD, UGHTEN, YERK, CAGG, and BORT? I could easily see these weird words getting constructors out of some jams when it comes to grid construction.

Sure, we’d have to educate solvers on these words, but if we can make ETUI a well-known form of crosswordese, why not these?

(Yes, I know, you want definitions. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. A badaud is a dimwitted gossip-spreader who believes just about anything. Ughten is morning twilight, the light that appears in the sky before the sun rises. To yerk is to beat someone vigorously and with rapid efficiency. A bort is a poor-quality diamond or a fragment of such a diamond (as well as a license plate that commonly runs out at Itchy and Scratchy Land). A cagg is a solemn vow not to drink for a certain amount of time.)

None of those words have appeared in the Times according to XWordInfo. Except BORT, but even that hasn’t appeared since 1993. Which is amazing, because the BORT joke on The Simpsons I referenced above happened in October of 1994. Come on, constructors, don’t leave us hanging. BORT did not have to lapse into irrelevance.

Speaking of words that have fallen by the wayside, I decided to try lost positives next.

Lost positives are words that were previously commonplace, but have been lost to time, while words with negative connotations based on them have survived. You know inept, inert, disheveled, uncouth, unkempt, and inane, but how often do you see ept, ert, sheveled, couth, kempt, pecunious, or ane?

Thus, lost positives.

So what happened when I checked them against the XWordInfo database?

EPT has appeared in the Times — as slang or a joking reference — but ERT hasn’t (except as a Scottish word). Nor has SHEVELED. KEMPT isn’t exactly common, but it has appeared in the last five years. COUTH hasn’t since 2003.

ANE, meanwhile, has hundreds of appearances, but as a hydrocarbon suffix, a Wheel of Fortune reference (“an e”), or as part of Sue Ane Langdon’s name.

So there’s some potential here.

frenchenglishwords

[Image courtesy of A Date With An Amateur.]

Hey, ERT gives me an idea. If we’re really going to discover some exciting, strange, and unexpected new grid fill, I think we have to look toward other languages.

All sorts of words that originate in other languages end up as part of the expansive English vocabulary. As James Nicoll once said, “We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

Why not continue on in that fine tradition and add to the potential puzzle word lexicon?

In the last few years, the concept of hygge has grown in popularity. Hygge is a Danish and Norwegian word for a mood of coziness and comfortable conviviality with feelings of wellness and contentment. You can see how people would latch onto the concept for themselves.

So I was surprised to discover that hygge hadn’t appeared in the NYT. That’s a letter pattern begging for crossings.

Personally, I think we should start with words like hygge. A word that exists in another language to describe a concept that there simply isn’t a word for in English.

Saudade, while a bit long for casual grid use, is another word that has started making the transition into English vernacular. Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves.

There is a world of vocabulary out there waiting to be harnessed for crossword obscurity, and there’s even a website dedicated to it.

If you check out Eunoia, you’ll find hundreds of foreign words to encapsulate moods and ideas, feelings and expressions that can plug holes both in your vocabulary and your grids.

Crossword.

Here’s a small sampling of words I found on the site that might help cruciverbalists who have constructed themselves into a corner:

Resfeber is a Swedish word for “the feeling of excitement and nervousness experienced by a traveler before undertaking a journey.”

Ubuntu is a Zulu word for “a quality that includes the essential human virtues, a combination of compassion and humility.”

Mångata is a Swedish word for “the road-like reflection of moonlight on water.”

Wegbier is a German word for “a beer you’re having on your way somewhere (i.e. a party).”

Karelu is a Tulu word for “the mark left on the skin by wearing something tight.”

Rauxa is a Catalan word for “sudden determination or action.”

Umay is a Tagalog word for “getting tired of a certain food.”

To Fernweh is to have a yearning to see distant places (in German).

Either half of wabi-sabi, a Japanese word meaning “finding beauty within the imperfections of life and peacefully accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay” could prove handy in a grid.

So I put the question to you, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers. What words would you like to see appear in crosswords more? Where do you think we should look for fresh, new, peculiar crosswordese? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!

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Let’s Play Crossword Bingo!

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Crossword.

If you solve enough crosswords, you’re bound to encounter some words more often than others.

Maybe the word has grid-friendly letters or a letter pattern that facilitates editing. Maybe it’s an otherwise obscure item that crosswords have kept in the zeitgeist.

Or maybe it’s a just three-letter word with vowels on either end, be it a female sheep, a tavern drink, a mine find, or fury, and that corner just won’t be completed without one of them.

Some solvers find fault with those words, the constructors who use them, or the outlets that publish puzzles featuring them. Other solvers, however, find fun ways to acknowledge their ubiquity.

For instance, a reddit user under the handle “atleasttheresmusic” created a bingo card based on words that crop up regularly in The New York Times crossword:

xwd bingo 1

Not only did they hit some classic examples of crosswordese, but they even managed to categorize their entries, highlighting crossword tropes like “short, poetic words” and the frequent use of abbreviations.

Between the bingo card itself and the many suggestions shared by fellow puzzlers in the comments, I couldn’t resist taking a crack at making a crossword bingo card of my own:

xwd bingo 2

As you can see, I’ve also organized the columns by category; from left to right, there’s abbreviations, names, vowel-heavy words, 3-letter entries, and non-U.S. terminology.

I couldn’t fit every entry I wanted to — EKE/IKE fell by the wayside, as did EWER — but I managed to jam a fair amount of crosswordese and personal pet peeves onto the card. Plus, given how often ALEE and ALOE appear, they’re basically a free space in the center of the card.

So how did I do, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? What words should I have included? Did the cleaner card created by “atleasttheresmusic” win out over mine, or did we both succeed in having some fun at the expense of crosswords?

And, most importantly, how quickly would you get BINGO if you used one of our cards? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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Inclusiveness in Puzzles: New LGBTQ+ Scrabble Words!

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wordwithfriendsjedi

From time to time, someone will ask me whether a certain word is appropriate for a crossword. It could be a new constructor, or an aspiring constructor, or a fan of crosswords. It could be about a relatively new slang term, or an obscure word, or a foreign word, or a celebrity. Sometimes, they’re wondering if it’s too hard, or too new, or too niche, or whether it’s appropriate for crosswords at all.

That’s the thing. There is no one source you can go to for all your crossword questions. There’s no definitive list of appropriate words or phrases, because the language is constantly changing and evolving. Pop culture is dynamic, and new ideas, concepts, and personalities are always cropping up. In that way, crosswords are essentially eternal, because the source material constantly shifts in popularity and familiarity. There are always new words to fill those iconic black-and-white grids.

But, if you were looking for that mythical definitive list of appropriate words, it’s not unreasonable to assume you’d go to the International Scrabble Dictionary, the official source for what is allowed as a valid answer word in a game of Scrabble.

Recently, for the first time since 2015, new words were added to the approved list. Over 2800 fresh entries are now officially eligible for tournament and at-house use, and they’ll all appear in the latest edition of Collins Official SCRABBLE Words. (Collins, which also publishes the Collins English Dictionary, added the words after they were approved for use in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary last year. These 2800 words join over 276,000 already approved for Scrabble play.)

It’s quite appropriate that we’re covering this story in June. As many of you are aware, June is Pride Month, and awareness of LGBTQ+ issues and culture affects all aspects of life, even puzzle games!

Among those 2800 newly-approved entries are non-binary and gender-neutral words like “genderqueer” and “agender,” as well as related terminology like “misgender” and “cisgender.”

But the LGBTQ+-friendly term that’s getting the most attention in Scrabble circles is “ze”. This two-letter word is a gender-neutral pronoun, allowing individuals who don’t identify as strictly male (he/him) or female (she/her) to better differentiate themselves and their gender identity.

letterz

For Scrabble players, the word opens up a whole host of new possibilities. After all, “ze” allows far greater opportunity to score big points by playing that valuable Z tile. (“Ze” is only the third two-letter z-word to be authorized for the game, joining “za” and “zo.”)

Now, obviously, in the grand scheme of things, this is a very small step for LGBTQ+ representation, but it is a step. After all, every opportunity to include LGBTQ+ culture and embrace it is part of making it a more familiar part of life for all of us.

In this small way, Scrabble includes previously marginalized individuals by not only accepting these new words, but by changing and adapting in order to do so. It’s an act of welcoming.

Here’s hoping there are far more acts like this, big and small, to come.

[Sources: Pride.com, New York Times, Collins Dictionary.]

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Importmanteau edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of portmanteaus.

[Image courtesy of upenn.edu.]

For the uninitiated, a portmanteau is a word that combines two words and represents aspects of both of them. Smog is a portmanteau of smoke and fog. Spork, avionics, brunch, labradoodle, cyborg, Pinterest, webinar, glitterati, Reaganomics, sharknado…these are all portmanteau words.

It can be a handy way to coin a term for a situation that doesn’t already have a word to describe it. For instance, I like to think of that unpleasant sensation that you’re going to drop your car keys down a storm drain as “sedanxiety.” A disastrous kiss? “Liplockalypse.”

And clearly I’m not the only one who enjoys crafting new portmanteaus.

Tom Murphy, not to be confused with Tom Swifty (another big name in wordplay), set himself a seemingly impossible challenge: create a portmanteau that includes every word in the English language. A lofty goal, considering there are around 100,000 words in our dictionary.

Utilizing a keen knowledge of French grammar, he coins this project a portmantout, using the French word for “all.”

And not only does he coin a few choice portmanteaus along the way, but he succeeds in creating a single portmanteau that contains every word in the English language:

Granted, that word is 611,000 letters long, but hey, it’s still a pretty impressive bit of coding and wordsmithing.

I look forward to a future video where he says the word out loud.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Welsh Landmarks edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, let’s return to the subject of vocabulary and pronunciation!

[Image courtesy of Savethewords.org]

One of the best things about doing puzzles is that you get to learn new words.

Whether they’re obscure or antiquated, hip new slang, borrowings from foreign languages, or simply neat words you’ve never encountered before, these words can be a delight to encounter while solving. (Even if you’re baffled while solving and have to look them up afterward.)

But the problem with some of these words is that if you only see them in print, you might not know how to pronounce them. For instance, it took me quite a long time to connect the written word “quinoa” with the spoken word that sounded like “keen-wah.” I know I’m not alone on that one.

So, imagine, if you will, you’re on vacation in the United Kingdom, and you stumble upon this small town:

Welcome to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, a town in Anglesey in the UK.

This 58-character place name is actually only 51 letters long, as certain character groups in Welsh are considered as one letter (LL, NG, and CH among them).

Would you be able to pronounce it? I don’t think I would!

But check out this TV weatherman, who doesn’t blink twice at tackling this mind-boggling word:

Now that’s a puzzler who won’t be daunted by some uncommon vocabulary.

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