Common / rare update

[Alan W]

I've just changed some words from common to rare, and a few from rare to common.

The lists below include a few plurals that are not allowed in normal puzzles, but I have shown them because they are accepted in "Your puzzles" if the option to allow all plurals has been selected in generating a puzzle.

These are the words that are now common:

congest
congesting
gnostic
gnostics
moonrise

And these are the ones that are now rare. (At last! We've dealt with the tench and its fishy friends.)

aconite
airfoil
airfoils
andiron
bally
boho
boney
borsch
brickie
brickies
calculi
coney
coneys
coopt
dace
dink
dinkies
dunno
eglantine
gars
gatecrash
ghee
gits
goober
goobers
hake
halva
heuristic
hotted
ikon
ikons
ling
lings
mingy
nada
nock
nowt
pelf
phage
plaice
raja
rajas
ricked
ricking
schwa
schwas
shad
summat
tench
turps
twee
uncannier
uncanniest
vive

[ensiform]

It's a sad day when 'schwa' is considered rare by a group of ostensible word mavens...  There's nowt wrong wi' schwa - it's a bally fine word - but I dunno if there's nae summat wrong wi' ye mingy twee goobers! Vive schwa!

Thanks for all the work you do, Alan.

[pat]

I think most of us will be surprised at some of the words reclassified as rare, ensiform. For me it's the names of fish.

[mkenuk]

The problem is, Pat, as we've seen from some posts recently, that fish that Brits think of as common (eg plaice) are not so well known on t'other side of the Atlantic, and vice versa. I wouldn't know what a shad looked like if it jumped up and bit me on the ankle. To me it's a fish that inhabits crossword puzzles and word games. Mind you, I'm not really sure what a dace looks like either, nor a tench.
MK

[ensiform]

Attach them to some exotic-sounding multisyllabic descriptor or gobbledygook, and the fish sound like Star Wars names.

Shad Starjumper.
Dace Kintarr.
Tench Bintares.

[birdy]

or heroes of romance novels!