Another common word rant

[Tom44]

From the Thesaurus puzzle - Hussar?  Common?  Really??  I have a hard time believing this is a common word.

BTW, is there another word for thesaurus?

[ensiform]

To me it seems very common.

[Tom44]

Of the common words in that puzzle, it had the lowest hit rate.  That doesn't mean much in itself, but I was rather stunned to find it listed common.  Shows you what difference there is in backgrounds.

[mkenuk]

It's one of those words that it seems I've always known without, until yesterday, knowing exactly what it meant.

Historical adventure stories always had hussars in them - I had visions of soldiers on horseback charging into battle, waving swords and lances in the air - Light Brigade style.

It seems that although the word comes from eastern Europe, quite a few English-speaking countries - Canada, Ireland and UK - still have regiments of hussars, although the cavalry horses appear to have changed into tanks and armoured personnel carriers!

MK

[rogue_mother]

Of the common words in that puzzle, it had the lowest hit rate.

Actually, hauteur was the common word with the lowest hit rate. Twenty-five fewer players found hauteur than found hussar. And although we  don't have any hussars in the United States, I have known about them for what seems like forever.

[ensiform]

It wouldn't take much to write those words in a sentence together.

"To me the word hussars seems very common," he sniffed with hauteur.

[TRex]

With hauteur, his hussars handed him his huffy hussy!

[Hobbit]

Thanks TRex that really made me chuckle!

[birdy]

Very good, TRex!

[Alan W]

This is one of the words I put in the too hard basket when I did a bulk acceptance of common-to-rare requests a while ago. The reason for deferring was that some of the comments in this thread questioned the idea that it isn't a common word.

The word is found a lot more often in British publications than American. One reason is that quite a few British regiments seem to have the word Hussar in their names. I also saw a few references to a Hungarian restaurant in Soho (London) called the Gay Hussar. From South African sources there were references to the Hussar Grill restaurant. Australian references tended to refer to some tropical fish, the pink hussar and the brown hussar - said to be delicious, but not well known in southern states.

When I did find a number of instances in a US corpus, most of them were from either Military History magazine or the Hudson Review, which ran some extracts from classic Russian novels. (The word appears 190 times in the Project Gutenberg version of War and Peace.)

My conclusion is that the word hussar is well known in various specialist contexts, but is not really common. Some people, like MK - and me too - will have encountered the word in reading without ever knowing its precise meaning. But I imagine quite a lot of players, especially those outside the UK, would not have come across the word.

So from now on it will be treated as a rare word.