These suggestions were made in an email from alar:
The other words are "naris" (singular) and "nares" (plural). Naris is Latin for nostril. I have encountered "nares" in an anatomy class, but I'm not sure if it is familiar enough to be even considered a rare word. I don't know if its being Latin is a cause for its disallowance.
Where is the line drawn between disallowed Latin words (if there are any) and those that are allowed because they are terms used in medicine, etc.?
References:
1. The Free Dictionary http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/naris
2. Ninjawords http://ninjawords.com/naris
I'm guessing that it was the plural
nares that you tried, alar, because
naris is already accepted. In fact,
nares is also in our word list, but it's flagged as an unacceptable plural. (Unacceptable in daily puzzles, but acceptable in
Your Puzzles if the "Allow all words ending with S" option was selected in puzzle creation.)
The problem for
nares is that there is also a word
nare in our list. And, guess what? It means nostril, too. The Shorter Oxford tells me that
nare is archaic and "long rare" except in the special sense of a nostril of a hawk. Here's a hawk with visible nare, from Australian football iconography:
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So we have two words,
nares and
nares, with the same spelling and the same meaning - but presumably different pronunciation. Since all these words are quite rare, I'm not inclined to allow
nares in puzzles with plural restrictions. I hope my decision won't get up anyone's nose.
As for the broader question about Latin words, they are not intended to be treated any differently from words of any language other than English. Such words are allowed only where they have become part of the English language. Words that are occasionally used by English speakers and writers but have not been "naturalized" or "assimilated" into the language are sometimes printed in italics by dictionaries. I've tended to follow the judgements of the dictionaries on whether a word is foreign, where available.
