Yelnats mentioned langosta as a missing word in the 7 by many club thread.

The word is in a few dictionaries, although with slightly different definitions. Merriam-Webster says, "a South or Central American spiny lobster of the genus Panulirus". The online Oxford says, "(US) another term for langouste".

A recent usage example is from the Miami New Times in May this year, where a photo was captioned,"The langosta from Como Como inside the Moxy Miami South Beach".

It will be accepted in future as a rare word.

Yesterday I received this email from a player:

How about the word destock in today's Challenge game?
Surely it warrants some sort of guernsey,but it isn't being
allowed as a word at all.Farmers would be very familiar with
the word when they have to sell off their animals in times of
drought or other disasters.I guess farmers are too busy to play Chihuahua,so none of them have complained about the
assessment of this word.

Occasionally somebody sends me a suggestion via email. But I think this is the first time I've received a suggestion resulting from a Chihuahua puzzle book.

My correspondent had been playing puzzle 2 in the 7-by-many puzzles book, Volume 3, and was unhappy that metropole wasn't listed in the solutions. I don't think I was aware of this word, other than as a hotel name. But it is listed, in lower case, in a number of dictionaries, including the online Oxford and Merriam-Webster and Wiktionary. It has a few meanings, but the main ones seem to be the parent state of a colony, or the main town of a territory.

A recent usage example is from the Washington Examiner of 6 May:

...her thesis that the “erasure of empire” is rooted in a “fundamental incompatibility between the imperial project and British institutions developed in the metropole” is necessarily more speculative.

I've added metropole as a rare word. The letters for this word may not yet have come up in a daily puzzle, but they probably will some time.

Some of you may have noticed the word "new" appearing on some of the tabs for Chihuahua puzzles:



This is for the benefit of people (like me) who aim to play every daily puzzle. It is intended to alert you when there are currently-open puzzles that you haven't yet played.

It won't always be accurate if you play on multiple devices.

If you never see this "new" message, it may be that your version of Chihuahua hasn't yet updated. Give it a day or two.

Please let me know if there are any problems with this new feature.

A while ago I had an email from someone who plays the puzzles in Chihuahua books. He said he would like it if the books sold in the UK omitted American words and spelling. I replied that it might be a possibility to have separate British and American editions of the books, but I doubted if I could reliably compile separate word lists. However I pointed out that words that are not well known in all English-speaking countries are generally classed as rare.

As an example, he had mentioned careen - treated as a common word in Chi puzzles - which he said was an American version of the verb career. I hadn't previously noticed that these two very similar words could be used in the same way: "the car went careening/careering across the road". Nor had it occurred to me that one of these words is more associated with British English and the other more with American English. But it seems it is so, at least to a certain extent. Corpus searches show careen used several times more frequently in the US than in Britain, while careered and careering are used more often in the UK than in the US.

However I'm not convinced that careen would be unknown to most speakers of British English. Certainly I, an Australian, know the word. While I was pondering this question I happened to notice the word used twice in a recent Australian novel, All Our Shimmering Skies, by Trent Dalton. For example:

One buffalo loses its footing in the uneven roadside and careens unstoppably into Greta's door, horns crashing into moving metal.

So I'd be interested in comments about careen from non-American forumites. Likewise from Americans about verb forms of career. Obviously career itself should remain common, for its use meaning a professional life, but careered and careering are also common at present.

As discussed in another thread, there is now a book of supersized Chi puzzles, for those who like a puzzle that takes a bit longer.



Each puzzle has from 61 to 120 common words, plus lots of rare words of course.

Most of the previous Chihuahua books have allowed all plurals, because it seemed like the rules applied online would be confusing to some book puzzlers. To minimize the tedium of writing down lots of plurals I've tried to ensure not many of the puzzles in each book included an S. However, for this new Jumbo series, I'm applying the online plural rules, because any puzzle with an S having up to 120 common words would probably have an inordinate number of plurals ending in S.

However I have taken care to exclude any puzzle with words in the solution that might bewilder new players: tongs, dues, etc.

The new book is available to order now from Amazon sites in most countries, though sadly not from Amazon's Australian site. It may take a few weeks for the book to be listed by Amazon Australia and non-Amazon sites.

Some questions for forumites who have used Chihuahua puzzle books.

I'm thinking about the possibility of releasing a new type of book, with larger puzzles - that is, puzzles that have more words to be found. The main series of nine-letter puzzle books has from 41 to 60 common words per puzzle. There are also puzzles with 15 to 25 common words: the Express and Compact series.

This leaves out a lot of possible puzzles with more than 60 common words. Such puzzles would presumably keep the player occupied for longer, which might please some people. (I was going to say it could be handy on a long trip, but it may be that not many people will be going on long trips for some time to come.)

So I'd welcome people's thoughts on the idea of a book of Chi puzzles with, say 61 to 120 common words to be found in each puzzle.

Using such a book, the player might run out of space on the page for writing in their words, but I don't like the idea of providing extra pages for the player's solution, because that would mean fewer puzzles in the book, somewhat defeating the purpose of bigger puzzles. The book could have bigger pages, but people might find that inconvenient. Maybe players will just have to write very small, or use a separate sheet of paper.

Please let me know what you think.