Abseiling swings into view again

[Alan W]

I think I've admitted in previous discussions about rare and common words that I've been rather sluggish to actually re-classify words, even when I've agreed a word is not truly common. Hence, we had abseiling as the nine-letter word in yesterday's Challenge puzzle, despite the fact that I've presented statistics demonstrating - to my mind - that abseil and its derived forms are seldom used in the US, and that the words should hence be treated as rare:

Abseil appears 92 times in the British corpus, but only once in the American Corpus. Rappel appears twice in the British corpus and 129 times in the American corpus. In this case, I find the corpus evidence persuasive. There's a definite regional pattern, so that each word is common among some English speakers, but relatively rare among others.

So, apologies for my negligence. However, it may be that all the discussion about the word in the forum helped people to think of it, since the percentage of players who got it, 43%, is not so unusually low. (To balance things up, we have also had rappelled as the nine-letter word, last New Year's Eve. 49% of the players found that.)

I will now hasten, stable door style, to re-grade all forms of abseil and rappel as rare.

[biggerbirdbrain]

Now that I finally learned what the word means, or that it even exists, at least it's being put in its proper place. Thanks, Alan.

[Alonzo Quixote]

Alan—

You chose a very interesting title for this thread.

It makes me think about a celestial body (i.e., a planet or a comet) which makes its way about the solar system and approaches Earth to be viewed on a non-frequent basis.

I'm thinking about either a comet that makes a spectacular appearance or an outer planet, either of which takes many, many years to circumnavigate the sun.