Reclassification requests

[Morbius]

Alan, to formalise discussions in the "Always a moment I can't wait for..." thread, could you please review the status of busby, busbies and begrime with a view to making then rare.

[Jacki]

Hear hear!

[Alan W]

Busby has always been rare, so there's an issue of consistency anyway.

I didn't see anyone speaking up for busbies to remain as a common word. It is in every dictionary I looked at, including American ones, but the word is used quite infrequently, even in Britain. (Apparently it's not an official term for the bearskin hats worn by the members of Guards regiments.)

I can't resist sharing this usage example from an article in Scottish newspaper the Daily Record last year, headed "Scots descend on London for King Charles' Coronation"

She had a special red, white and blue manicure for the occasion and wore crown earrings and a shirt decorated with Jack Russells in busbies and military jackets.

“The royal dog has changed,” she said. “The King and Queen have Jack Russells. It’s not corgis any more.”

Not everyone in Scotland was such an ardent royalist. The first reader's comment was:

Hey DR, I think your internet website has been hacked.

Every time I refresh the front page I just get an endless stream of drivel.

Contact the web master.

I'll change busbies to rare.

[Alan W]

Jacki actually queried begrime as a common word in 2019 and was backed up by Morbius and Valerie. I seem to have missed out on logging that suggestion at the time. Sorry!

Having said that, I'm not so sure it ought to be changed. It certainly has an old world feel, but dictionaries don't label it as archaic or dated. And it is used in contemporary publications. For example, a Daily Mail article in 2022:

Earlier this week, Zelensky saw for himself the aftermath of Bucha. Photographs showed his begrimed face etched with horror.

And an article last year in news.com.au:

Begrimed with engine grease, his colleagues peer under the hood of an impossibly battered 1991 wagon...

And in a recent Washington Post review of a Macbeth production starring Ralph Fiennes:

In a deracinated, begrimed landscape, a cluster of trees marks the only sign of life.

Of course, these examples are all using begrimed. Begrime and begriming are used much less often. But then, if I make begrime rare and leave begrimed as common, how long will it be before somebody complains about the inconsistency?

[Jacki]

Thanks Alan, just to be clear, at this stage begrime, begrimed and begriming are all still common words?

[Alan W]

Yes, but I'd be pleased to see any further comments. (Keep it clean!)

[Calilasseia]

Begrime and its derivatives do seem to be quaintly archaic usages, of a sort that might have appeared frequently in Jane Austen's era, but fell into serious disuse not long after.

Even with my quixotic history of reading matter, I can't recall seeing any of these being deployed.

[Maudland]

I’m generally reluctant to reclassify words to rare, when they are used (as per Alan’s examples) even if not every day, and we’ve probably heard of them. I like the challenge of those less familiar words! But even I am not that fussed about this one! Sitting squarely on the fence …

[Alan W]

Thinking it over, consistency is not such an issue, since begrimed is usually used as an adjective, rather than as a verb. I think it can justifiably remain as common. It can in fact be a seed word for a 7-by-many puzzle, though that hasn't happened yet.

The verb begrime, however, is indeed quite rarely used these days, so I'll make it rare. Begriming actually is already rare.

[pat]

As a matter of interest, how many words are actually in Chi's lexicon? What's the proportion of common vs. rare?

[Alan W]

To answer pat:

There are 189,836 admissible (not "plural") words in our database. Of these 46,899 (25%) are classed as common.

Of course, not all of these words could possibly ever come up in a puzzle. This is especially so since the introduction of the 7-by-many, when I expanded our lexicon to include words of any length. A lot of the very long words would never be playable. Confining the investigation to words of 4 to 9 letters, there are 108,144 words of which 33,647 (31%) are common.

In all the 20,000+ daily puzzles, from 2005 till now, there have been about 76,000 different words playable, of which about 29,000 (38%) were common.

[pat]

Thanks for that information, Alan. It leads me to another question. You say you expanded the lexicon when you introduced the 7-by-many puzzle (thanks for that one by the way - it's my favourite). How exactly did you do that?  What mechanism did you use to find all (or at least most) of the words that could be played using the 7 given letters?

[Jacki]

He could tell you but then he’d have to kill you!!

[Alan W]

The point I was trying to make was that I didn't attempt to identify the words that might come up in a puzzle. I simply added all the words longer than 10 letters. The source of these words was the same list - YAWL - that I used for the original version of Chi. The two issues that required some effort on my part were identifying the words that should be excluded as plurals or verb inflections ending in S, and identifying the words to be tagged as common.

The longest word in our lexicon is PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS. But I wouldn't bother memorising it - I'm pretty sure it will never be part of a solution. And, yes, we do have ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM and FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, but as each of them has more than 7 different letters it will never be part of a 7-by-many.