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General Category => Words => Topic started by: Jacki on June 11, 2020, 09:06:01 AM

Title: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: Jacki on June 11, 2020, 09:06:01 AM
Never heard of TOURNEY - when you press on it to see the meaning it's a tournament (and as a verb it says it's archaic) - the least played common word with 86, next lowest played common word was TYRO with 141 - I think that says it all!. I've learnt a new albeit extremely uncommon word, however I think it needs to be classed as rare.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: TRex on June 11, 2020, 10:43:44 AM
It might be archaic as a verb, but it is common enough as a noun. The venerable OED places it in Frequency Band 4. The OED ranks words from Band 8 (most common) to Band 1 (least common) and defines Frequency Band 4 as
Quote
Band 4 contains words which occur between 0.1 and 1.0 times per million words in typical modern English usage. Such words are marked by much greater specificity and a wider range of register, regionality, and subject domain than those found in bands 8-5. However, most words remain recognizable to English-speakers, and are likely be used unproblematically in fiction or journalism. Examples include overhang, life support, rewrite, nutshell, candlestick, rodeo, embouchure, insectivore (nouns), astrological, egregious, insolent, Jungian, combative, bipartisan, cocksure, methylated (adjectives), intern, sequester, galvanize, cull, plop, honk, skyrocket, subpoena, pee, decelerate, befuddle, umpire (verbs), productively, methodically, lazily, pleasurably, surreptitiously, unproblematically, electrostatically, al dente, satirically (adverbs).

Of the noun examples, I think the first six are definitely common. The seventh and eighth might be debatable, but if I missed them in a Chihuahua puzzle I wouldn't whinge about it as I might if a word from the OED's Band 3 were classified as common and it kept me from a rosette. Here's the OED's explanation of Band 3:
Quote
Band 3 contains words which occur between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in typical modern English usage. These words are not commonly found in general text types like novels and newspapers, but at the same time they are not overly opaque or obscure. Nouns include ebullition and merengue, and examples of adjectives are amortizable, prelapsarian, contumacious, agglutinative, quantized, argentiferous. In addition, adjectives include a marked number of very colloquial words, e.g. cutesy, dirt-cheap, teensy, badass, crackers. Verbs and adverbs diverge to opposite ends of the spectrum of use encompassed by this band. Verbs tend to be either colloquial or technical, e.g. emote, mosey, josh, recapitalize.

(But even some of those examples I personally think are common.)
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: Jacki on June 11, 2020, 11:27:00 AM
Thanks TRex I'll bear that in mind next time I have a whinge.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: rogue_mother on June 12, 2020, 03:00:37 AM
You know, it might be a North American thing. That always seems to bring out the whingeing. There are 644 instances of tourney in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/) versus 9 (yes, nine!) in the British National Corpus (https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/). Not that I picture this word as particularly American, but there you have it.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: TRex on June 12, 2020, 08:16:02 AM
Hmmm.... I might be whinging about the seed word in the Challenge puzzle for Friday 12 June 2020. Finally found it and it has not been played by many.

Several years ago, Alan wrote about the seed words which were played by the smallest percentage of players. The word I finally got today was on that list — not the smallest percentage, but close to it.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: rogue_mother on June 12, 2020, 10:37:28 AM
I don't play the Challenge game anymore, but I took a look after your post, TR. I had no trouble figuring it out.

But your remark seems to be a bit of a non sequitur. Shouldn't it have its own topic?
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: Greynomad on June 13, 2020, 07:56:23 AM
Certainly not a common word in my world, TRex, and nor many others including this game if the count is anything to go by.

The next least played common words were played nearly twice as much, there were a dozen or so other uncommon words played more, and I can honestly say I have never seen it used, nor heard it used during my lifetime.

Oh well, live and learn.

As for tourney, I have heard of it, but am not surprised that it’s regional it’s raised questions. It always does, whatever Regions words come up.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: TRex on June 13, 2020, 08:28:30 AM
I took a look at comparative usage of tourney between UK English and US English with the Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tourney%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Ctourney%3Aeng_us_2012&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0) and the usage seems remarkably similar, i.e. it is not an American word little used in the UK.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: mkenuk on June 13, 2020, 09:29:48 AM
The COD defines tourney as  'a medieval joust';  it refers to activities seen in in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Ivanhoe and the like.

The word has long been familiar to me;
I had always assumed it was an abbreviated form of  tournament but that is not quite true. The two words are related, of course, having a common source in Medieval French, but whereas tournament may be used nowadays of all sorts of competition, tourney seems to refer simply to jousting and the like.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: Jacki on June 13, 2020, 10:00:54 AM
Three more players found Panegyric than Tourney. Both were under 90.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: TRex on June 13, 2020, 10:35:07 AM
According to the OED, tourney is used more broadly than just jousting:
Quote
1971   Rand Daily Mail (Johannesburg) 4 Sept. 2/9   The Government's new sports policy..has guaranteed a welcome for all teams for next year's Federation Cup tennis tourney.
1976   Star (Sheffield) 3 Dec. 28/8   Last week with the results boosted by the netball tourney..there were 140 results in the Hotline columns.

I think it can be used for most any sports tournament, but — and I'm no sports expert — I suspect some sports use it, such as tennis and netball above, and some don't. I don't recall encountering it in reference to baseball or American 'football'. I think I've heard/seen it used in reference to golf.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: rogue_mother on June 13, 2020, 10:58:51 AM
I took a look at comparative usage of tourney between UK English and US English with the Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tourney%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Ctourney%3Aeng_us_2012&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctourney%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0) and the usage seems remarkably similar, i.e. it is not an American word little used in the UK.

I totally agree that it's not an *American* word little used in the UK. However, I found the wildly divergent occurrence numbers quite striking. The ngram viewer might not be as accurate a measure, since I think it only includes books. COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and BNC (the British National Corpus) include newspapers, magazines and blogs. The references were to contests in a wide variety of sports, not just jousting.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: TRex on June 14, 2020, 01:49:24 AM
I think it can be used for most any sports tournament, but — and I'm no sports expert — I suspect some sports use it, such as tennis and netball above, and some don't. I don't recall encountering it in reference to baseball or American 'football'. I think I've heard/seen it used in reference to golf.

It occurred to me that tourney used in sports is probably limited to either one-on-one sports (e.g. netball and tennis) — and then perhaps limited to competitions where a winner advances to the next round and the loser is eliminated — which would be like a jousting tourney, or sports where it is one competing against a field (e.g. golf). It probably would be inappropriate to use tourney for team sports.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: Alan W on June 15, 2020, 04:59:09 PM
The word tourney happened to pop up in the book I'm currently reading, The Wood Beyond, one of the Dalziel and Pascoe series of crime novels by Reginald Hill:

Quote
In appearance the head teacher was far from formidable. With her flowered  dresses, flattish shoes, bare legs, bobbed hair and round, smiling, glowing, almost make-up-less face, she wouldn’t have been out of place at a Betjeman tennis tourney.

I'm not mentioning this as support for the word being considered common. Hill delights in throwing in some very obscure words, such as hydriotaphic earlier in the same book.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: mkenuk on June 15, 2020, 09:47:13 PM
Quote

 Hill delights in throwing in some very obscure words, such as hydriotaphic earlier in the same book.

I could have probably told you what it meant fifty years ago when Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 book on the subject was on my Eng.Lit. syllabus.
I really don't think I've seen the word since then, but, having looked it up, I do see how it might feature in a Dalziel and Pascoe novel!

 ;D

Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: rogue_mother on June 19, 2020, 05:23:18 AM
It occurred to me to actually look up and categorize the examples on COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and BNC (the British National Corpus). The nine examples cited on BNC were as follows: traditional medieval - four, field hockey - two, rugby - two, chess - one. Since there were six hundred forty-four instances cited on COCA, I felt that was too many to go through all of them, even for me. But here is a representative sample of the types of contemporary usage in the United States: basketball, poker, soccer, traditional medieval, video games, boxing, ice hockey, volleyball, skiing, flip cup (American drinking game).

One can see that some team sports are included, but it appears that in nearly all cases, tourney refers to a multi-round competition where winners advance to the next round.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: birdy on June 19, 2020, 06:08:03 AM
I am surprised that so many Chihuahuans aren't familiar with this word.  I hear the word occasionally in news on sports (which I don't follow much), but I've seen it so often in my reading, mostly in medieval romances/historical fiction.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of the relative vocabularies  of those of us who like genre fiction - romance, mystery, historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy - and those who stick to more non-genre writing - literature, biography, history, social issues, politics, technology, etc.
Title: Re: TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game
Post by: Alan W on June 19, 2020, 09:31:08 PM
There is some evidence that tourney is used differently in the US from in the UK, Australia, etc. Some British published dictionaries define the word as relating exclusively to knightly tournaments, but others define it as another word for tournament, in all senses.

In any case, the word is used by newspapers around the English-speaking world for contemporary tournaments, in various sports, in chess, in contract bridge and in computer gaming. In 2011 the Melbourne Age had the headline "Malaysian tourney to test Kookas", the Kookaburras being the Australian men's hockey team. In 2008 the BBC News website headed a story "Nigeria late for Malaysia tourney". A 2017 rugby story in The Irish News, from Northern Ireland, reported:

Quote
Just one win in the current Inter-Pro campaign would have secured an automatic place, now relegation to the junior European Conference tourney seems inevitable.

It's certainly true that tourney is used more frequently in US publications than in Britain, especially in news reports. In the News on the Web corpus the word has 1.51 occurrences per million in the US, and 0.23 per million in the UK. But neither of these figures represents extreme rarity. Compare the frequency numbers for panegyric in the same corpus: 0.02 in the US and 0.03 in the U.K.

The word also appears in books, including by British authors. I mentioned in an earlier post its use by Reginald Hill. Wiktionary supplies an example from Jeeves in the Offing, by P.G. Wodehouse:

Quote
Kipper stood blinking, as I had sometimes seen him do at the boxing tourneys in which he indulged when in receipt of a shrewd buffet on some tender spot like the tip of the nose.

In fact, Wodehouse used the word in several books.

I'm going to leave tourney as a common word, but switch panegyric to rare.