Most dictionaries give the hyphenated form, hara-kiri, but Macquarie has it as one word, and Wiktionary allows that as an option. In use, both are quite often seen. In contemporary periodicals the word is mostly used in a figurative sense. Often this is in a sporting context, as in this sentence from a cricket report on the India TV News website in January this year:

But then, all hell broke loose as Lungi Ngidi and Kagiso Rabada ripped apart the Indian line-up in just 11 balls even as the harakiri of the batters also contributed to the crazy collapse.

At least, I suppose the batters didn't ritually disembowel themselves, but I don't follow the cricket closely.

I'll add harakiri as a rare word.

Unlike other dictionaries, Wiktionary lists tractor as a verb, with inflected forms tractoring and tractored. It gives a few meanings:

• (transitive, agriculture) To prepare (land) with a tractor.
• (intransitive) To drive a tractor.
• (transitive, science fiction) To move with a tractor beam.
• (transitive, medicine, archaic) To treat by means of tractoration, or Perkinism.

The OED doesn't give tractor as a verb, but it does list tractored as an adjective, as shown in the extract in the original post, and tractoring as both a noun and an adjective. The Shorter Oxford also includes tractoring, but not tractored.

Examples of these words in use are not hard to find. Some early instances were in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the novel, men with tractors are sent by the banks to clear farmland being repossessed from sharecroppers. The victims speak of being tractored off their farms:

"...Till we got tractored off, we was people with a farm.”

And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand.

"Tractoring for Women" is a hobby farming training course which recently won an award in South Australia, according to a story on the ABC website:

Tractoring for Women is designed to give participants the confidence to do basic things with a tractor such as swapping the forks for the bucket, attaching implements and moving around a property safely.

I'll add tractored and tractoring as rare words.

Yes, I think nullius by itself has not entered the English language, and so shouldn't be added to our word list.

It is part of some Latin phrases used by the legal profession, such as terra nullius, land belonging to nobody, or to no nation, and res nullius, anything belonging to nobody, such as a wild animal. It is also found in the motto of the Royal Society, Nullius in Verba, loosely translated as "Take nobody's word for it".

The word pants is derived from pantaloons, but I'm not totally comfortable with using pants as a precedent!

When, in 2008, I eventually relented and accepted pants and a number of other words, I explained my reasoning like this:

Briefly, anyone who sees one of these words in the solution should readily bring to mind the usage in which it rarely drops its S to make a singular form.

This seems to apply to pantaloons, if anything, more strongly than to some of the words I've accepted in the past. A pantaloon can be a reference to a buffoon-like character in a pantomime, but that is very rarely used, although I assume Shakespeare had this sense in mind in his seven ages of man:

... And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound....

In reference to the clothing style, the singular pantaloon is rarely used. One example was in a 2010 British Vogue article:

If you are looking to add some colour or a touch of summer whimsy to your wardrobe, a patterned pantaloon is the wild, offbeat luxurious option.

However, the headline of the article was "Printed Pantaloons". Writers sometimes also refer to "pantaloon-style trousers", as in a 2021 piece by Will Self about Extinction Rebellion, writing disparagingly of people in "pantaloon-style drawstring trousers".

All in all, it seems that singular pantaloon is very rarely seen, so the more usual form, pantaloons, should be allowed in future. And I feel the word is sufficiently well known to be treated as a common word.

I've no doubt chatbot should be accepted as a new word. The only question in my mind is whether it should be classed as common.

The word has been around since the 1990s, but has taken off in a massive way in the past year or so, resulting from the flurry of large language models that have been made available for widespread use. This is evident in the News on the Web corpus:



Most words added to our lexicon start out in the rare category. However there are some that have been treated as common from the outset. Often these are words associated with technology: barcode, blog, clickbait, hashtag, login, ringtone, texted and texting, and username.

Right now, I think chatbots are written about more often than many of those other terms. It's possible the word chatbot will decline in prominence after a while, but I suspect it will remain a commonly known term for some time. I'll add it to our list as a common word.

(This post was written by a human being.)

I did try chatbot myself, and if nobody else had suggested it, I would have raised the issue anyway.

Before applying my own intellect to this matter, it seems appropriate to ask a couple of chatbots for their thoughts. Firstly, ChatGPT 3.5:

Is "chatbot" a real word?

Yes, "chatbot" is indeed a real word. It refers to a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the internet. The term is a combination of "chat" and "robot," reflecting its purpose of engaging in conversation or dialogue automatically.

Is "chatbot" a common word in the English language or a rare word?

"Chatbot" is a relatively common word in the English language, especially in the context of modern technology and artificial intelligence. With the increasing prevalence of automated customer service systems, virtual assistants, and messaging applications, the term "chatbot" has become widely recognized and used in everyday language. It is frequently encountered in discussions about technology, communication, and automation.

And then, the Microsoft Bing Copilot (footnotes omitted):

Is "chatbot" a real word?

Certainly! The term “chatbot” is indeed a real word. It refers to a software application or web interface designed to mimic human conversation through text or voice interactions. These modern chatbots utilize generative artificial intelligence systems to engage in natural language conversations with users, simulating how a human would behave as a conversational partner. So yes, it’s a legitimate term used to describe these interactive conversational programs!

Is "chatbot" a common word in the English language or a rare word?

The term “chatbot” is fairly common in the English language. It refers to a computer program that can engage in conversations with users through text or voice interfaces. Chatbots are used for various purposes, from customer service to information retrieval, and they have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. While some people might consider it a bit buzz-y or narrow-focused, it remains a recognized and widely used term in the field of artificial intelligence and technology. So, if you’re curious about chatbots, you’re definitely not alone!

Quite good answers - although the Microsoft bot could be a bit more sparing with the exclamation marks.

I'll come back to this shortly.

The discussion of this in the More or Les topic was spread over several posts, starting with this one.

As mentioned in those posts, the earliest known use of buggerlug (note the singular form) was in a US publication in 1839. However that was in a different sense of the word than the one people seem to have in mind: "Chiefly English regional (Dorset) and in form bugalug. A likeness or model of a person, typically a person who is hated; an effigy. Also occasionally: something contemptible or undesirable. Now rare." I'm willing to say that this use of the word is so rare we can disregard it.

The way the word is used in some parts of the world nowadays is almost always in the plural form and with the meaning, as given by the OED:

Chiefly humorous. An annoying or foolish person. Usually as an affectionate form of address or mild term of reproof. Occasionally in singular. Now chiefly British regional, Australian, and New Zealand.

The earliest known use of this sense was in 1861 in a book called Life and Adventure in the South Pacific:

Shiver my timbers! old buggerlugs, if you don't come to terms pretty soon, I'll treat you to a salt-water bath.

Wherever the word originated, it does seem now to be associated with the lands down under. Apart from the OED and Wiktionary, it's found in the Australian Oxford, the Macquarie (from Australia) and the New Zealand Oxford.

Because it includes bugger, the word has sometimes been deemed offensive, probably an indication that it's not in very wide use. The speaker of the Northern Territory parliament in Australia ruled it unparliamentary language, and in 2022 the British Horseracing Authority forced an owner to change the name of a horse called Buggerlugs. The Mirror reported:

The 'informal, old-fashioned' term is 'for referring or speaking to someone in a slightly insulting but friendly way' according to the Cambridge Dictionary. However just a day before the juvenile's debut at Beverley on Tuesday, Rhodes was told he would have to think of new name for Buggerlugs.

Bosses at the British Horseracing Authority felt that most people would be unfamiliar with it and notice the unpleasant swear word.

The horse's owner, who believed the word came from his native Yorkshire, planned to appeal.

I'll add buggerlugs as a rare word, together with the variant form bugalugs, noted by Wiktionary.

No, we don't currently accept either of those words, or any other variants as far as I can see. One way to check such things would be to create a puzzle in "Your Puzzles" with the "Choose your own letters" option, and see if the word of interest is accepted.

I'll look at this suggestion in due course, but I must share one usage example. I was surprised at how recent were most of the citations given by dictionaries, so I had a look in the excellent Trove database, provided by the National Library of Australia, which allows you to search many old newspapers and other periodicals. I found the following short item in the 3 April 1942 edition of The Areas Express and Farmers Journal, published in Booyoolee, South Australia:

THE WEIGHT OF THE BULLOCK.
At the Jamestown Market of Messrs. Goldsbrough, Mort & Co. on March 10 the competition for estimating the weight of the bullock given by Mr. Jas. Pilkington was won by Mr. W. Scott of Jamestown with estimate fo 659 lbs. with Mr. J. L. Kennedy second with 656 lbs. The correct weight was 658 lbs. Nurse Buggerlugs also estimated 656 lbs.

On the face of it, it would appear that Nurse Buggerlugs was a competitor's actual name, unlikely as that seems. Perhaps people were able to enter using an alias. But, in any case, why did not the nurse share in 2nd prize if she had the same entry as J.L. Kennedy? I think an inquiry is called for.