A google search on "thruway" retrieves fewer than 200 ltems and at least half of these are about the "New York Thruway".  There is no way that this is "common".

My brain has also got the enlist, listen, silent, tinsel combo hard-wired.  Worse though is the rectal claret cartel.

Ozzyjack,

I’m afraid I’m a bit thick.  In your first table in the 2018 / 3601+ entry you have the number 13.  What exactly have these 13 members done?
In the second table, in the 2018 / 1001+ posts entry, you have the number 8.  I also cannot comprehend what this means.  What have these 8 members done?

Cheers,
Oldpaul

Mike, Alan has asked you not to “complain” about the ranking of words!  I agree that suppurate and suppurated are more rare than common.  They are quite rare in the medical literature as well whereas suppuration (which is longer than 10 letters) is quite common there.

Alan said (re selfie):

The only possible concern about this word is how long it might last. Linguist Geoff Nunberg had a piece on NPR's Fresh Air on 12 September about the admission into Oxford Dictionaries Online of a batch of new words, including selfie. he said

Quote
And Oxford's recent list included "selfie," "fauxhawk" and the exclamations "derp" and "squee," not to mention the abbreviation SRSLY, as in "seriously." If you haven't picked up on all of these yet, I wouldn't worry. None of them is likely to outlive your hamster.

***

What tosh Geoff Nunberg.  Selfie is as common as mud while the others are obviously jargon and ephemeral, though not noticeably less common than a word you allow Allan: dweep (or was it dweeb?).  Show me some people who don’t know what selfie means.

I vote for the word selfie becoming common and the practice of taking them becoming rarer.
Oldpaul

TRex: I keep a spreadsheet of my results against the maximum number of common words. I’m mad, I know, but I’m trying to keep track of any signs of dementia (remembering a good friend who died last year and who rapidly become incapable of solving target word puzzles).
I have nearly complete records (for between 25 and 31 days in each month) starting last year.  For months starting 11th and ending 10th of the following month, average number of common words were:
Challenge:  Aug-Sept 2016: 63.5; Nov-Dec 2016: 58.5; Feb-Mar 2017: 59.7; May-Jun 2017: 59.9; Aug-Sept 2017 (recent): 57.0
Standard (Same months): 40.4, 38.6, 38.3, 41.3, (recent): 39.3
In other words, I think the number of common words has been pretty constant

I fear that I might be responsible for Alan thinking of demoting “eland” from common to rare.  I suggested “eland” as an example of a word that had similar limited currency to the word “coir” which he has as “rare” and which I asked to be elevated.

I now see that he doesn’t have “echidna” as common because it won’t generally be familiar to players outside Australia.  Sorry Alan, but why don’t you demote “bison” and “moose” because they are words that players outside north America very seldom use except in a word game?

Alan,  You will fail to recruit potential players if you demote words like eland.  I think there is a good case for keeping some “word game words” as common – these are the sort of words that scrabble players have embedded in their brains and they will hardly think much of your website if they don’t find their words here.  At least you don’t have to worry about all those tedious and tiresome issues about 2- and 3-letter words that have made scrabble almost unplayable.

Incidentally, I thought that Calilasseia’s contribution to this topic was brilliant.  I’d thought that beluga was a curious inclusion in the common word list – thinking that it referred to the caviar(e) and forgetting it was a type of whale – but I would include all those coypus, colugos etc.  There’s nothing wrong in including some of the trivial pursuit sort of words and it makes the game more fun.

And, turning to something quite different:  surely “cabernet” is a common word?  It is used in wines more frequently than “pinot”.

But, the weakest feature of the present common wordlist is the inclusion of all these silly comparative adjectives.  You may well have heard the word “ashiest” as often as you did the word “colugo” but at least “colugo” takes you into territory where you might learn something.

And as for “reascend”!!!  Well I ask you!  How on earth did this become “common”?

I have two uncles even older than I am (they are 80 and 87) who competitively play the Target word puzzle in The Age newspaper each day.
The wordlist is more-or-less derived from Chambers Dictionary.  My older uncle insists on using the Shorter Oxford as his authority.  My younger uncle finds this “irritating”.
I must say I agree with my younger uncle.  Just accept the words allowed by the compiler and get on with it.
Alan puts a huge effort into protecting the integrity of the website and - barrister or judge-like -  puts his case whether various words should be regarded as common or rare.  This makes for interesting reading and is illuminating and scholarly about the origins and uses of words.
For example, I learned a great deal about the word “solidus”.  The only time I’d come across the word solidus was several years ago when a friend asked me to get an opinion about a “Byzantine” / eastern Roman empire coin.
I suggested that the word “coir” was common and I accept Alan’s judgment that it isn’t.  I would suggest, however, that it is more common than the word “peatier”: I thought of this because peat and coir are analogous in gardeners’ minds but I’d imagine that the use of the word “peatier” is largely confined to reviews of whisky.  There are a number of “common” comparative adjectives that are hardly common, eg bandiest or, just a day or so ago: hammiest.

Alan argued, in disallowing “coir” as common:
“Coir is a fibre from the husks of coconuts, used to make mats, rope, garden products, etc. Anyone who has recently been shopping for a doormat may well have come across the word, but then how often does a person shop for doormats? Publications elsewhere don't seem to use the word very much. And when they do, it's mainly in gardening and home decor sections, which not everyone reads.

“I don't want words to be common just because they commonly appear in Chi puzzles!”

But, so why is “eland” common?  I happen to have grown up in southern Africa (where elands are indeed common).  I doubt whether the word “eland” enters into the minds of the overwhelming majority of word game players except when they are playing a word game.  By this argument, “eland” has less justification to be called common than “coir”.

But there are number of other words that I don’t regard as common:
Take “duodena”:  Half my career was spent as a medical librarian and, while the word is grammatically correct, I don’t recollect ever having heard it before.  On the US National Library’s MEDLINE Plus database it has occurred 161 times since 1966 (in over 10 million documents) and some of these are obviously typos for duodenal.  If you google “duodena” and go past the ludicrous estimate of over 100,000 hits, you will find that there are at the very most under 400 items, not all of which are in English.
I won’t go irritatingly on and I’ll happily accept Alan’s verdicts and I’ll try to remember “solidus” next time!
Thanks again Alan.