Yesterday (17th May) I did better than usual in the ten-letter, finishing one short of a rosette. The missing word? 'glutes'. glutes? COD and Chambers don't have it, and the best the Free Dictionary can do is refer to 'glute' and say 'often used in the plural'. The point is I had already played 'glute' as an uncommon word. So can somebody tell me, please, what is this 'glutes' that is a common word which is not the plural of 'glute' but which at least three dictionaries haven't heard of?
Maybe one of the three solvers who did get a rosette? They must know what it means.
In confusion.
MK
 

{Came in 10th May 10-letter ('hypnotized')}. Is it really common? It's a good old-fashioned word, but I wonder if anyone still uses it? I suspect it's been replaced by 'tomboy' in most people's usage.
MK

sicced. A common word from yesterday's 10-letter (disconnect). Even the Free Dictionary shows it as a 'dialectal variant' of 'seek'. My COD and Chambers don't have it at all. Surely a candidate for the 'uncommon' box?
MK

About a year ago, I remember a forum discussion about characters from literature whose names were acceptable in Chi, for example 'scrooge'. I think 'micawber' 'pickwick' and even 'dumbledore' were possible.  I think someone had requested 'svengali' be included. Another one came up in yesterday's standard ('allotting / totalling') - 'lolita', from the Nabokov novel and the Stanley Kubrick film.
  MK

Quite a few scientific terms in there - familiar enough to those of a scientific disposition, but for the rest of us....? 'Corm' is common enough in Chi games for me to know it, but I can't remember ever seeing it anywhere else. I had a vague idea that 'isomer' was something in chemistry, and having got that, I put '-ic' on it for another point. I managed to work out one of the 9-letters ('isometric') from that. But 'meiotic'! Having looked it up, I still don't know what it means. Is there a geneticist in the house?
MK

Common word in yesterday's 10-letter (comparison).
An enlisted man in the US Navy, trained in first aid, apparently.
Can also be used for a member of the Peace Corps, according to the Free Dictionary. Still, I doubt if it's a common word outside those two fields.   
MK

Is this a common word? Seems like a military term, from the definition in COD; Chambers doesn't have it; can't say I've ever come across it before.
 ???MK

I thought that 'adlib' might be allowed in today's 10-letter game ('disputable'), but it was 'not known'. I suppose, strictly speaking, it should be written with a hyphen (ad-lib);  but so, perhaps, should 'sub-edit' which is allowed in the same puzzle (as uncommon). Hyphens can be a nuisance; A bit like 're-' words - you never know if Chi is going to allow them or not. Lynne Truss in 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' says that in her opinion hyphens' days are numbered. I just wonder if it would be possible for Chi to treat hyphens in the same way it treats accents on foreign words, and ignoring them? Or would the re-programming (reprogramming) involved be too much?
Just a suggestion - not a complaint, and most certainly not a gripe or a whinge!!
MK