lassitude common?

[TRex]

Yesterday's puzzle classified lassitude as a common word. When words like alit are classified as rare (same puzzle), I wonder how the dividing line between common and rare is drawn.

[Tom44]

I don't know how common lassitude is as a word, but its pretty common for me as a feeling.

[birdy]

Me, too, especially when I woke up much too early and haven't had any coffee yet.

[Alan W]

I would classify lassitude as common and alit as rare, TRex, because lassitude is used more often!

It's an alternative to alighted, as the past tense of alight, meaning to get out of a vehicle or to find by chance. We class alighted as common, but not alit. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 26 instances of alit, compared with 159 for lassitude and 162 for alighted.

Alit is even rarer in the British National Corpus: only one example (from a poem by Ted Hughes, "And the dove alit / In the body of thorns"). This corpus has 88 examples of alighted and 32 of lassitude. I found similar results in Google Book Search and various newspaper archives.

[Steadyguy]

I thought lassitude was two words anyway, as in the sentence "The dog lassi tude his dinner up very quickly".

Well researched Alan as always.