flexitime?

[TRex]

Apologies for the belated timing (crises at work). I had hoped someone else would question the use of flexitime as a nine letter seed word. I relatively quickly found all the common words except the seed word when this was used a few days ago. Per Google's Ngram Viewer, it appears it initially was favoured over flextime, but quickly faded and was mostly replaced by it. There seems to be no use of either prior to 1970 and neither are all that common (flexitime is about the same frequency as rostra by 2000).

[birdy]

I don't think I've ever seen "flexitime" - and I'm vaguely under the impression that I've only seen flex time as two words.

[mkenuk]

I haven't lived in UK for about 35 years, but I remember a cousin, who worked for a branch of the Civil Service, talking about being able to 'go onto flexitime'. It seemed to be quite well known at the time.

I remember the game and remember noticing that TRex was only short of 'flexitime' for a rosette. At the same time, I, too, was one word short - 'flextime'.

The COD shows 'flexitime' as its main entry for the word, and adds '(N. Amer. also flextime)'

The word count for that game is revealing: flexitime - 429 plays, 'flextime' - 138 plays.

MK

[Les303]

flexitime... Both the word & the practice are still commonly used in my workplace today (queensland government ) but I have never come across it as flex time either as a single or two words

[Alan W]

It seems that all four of the following forms are used:

flextime
flex-time
flexitime
flexi-time

The preferred term varies from country to country. According to the Corpus of Global Web-based English, flex-time is used most in the US and Canada, followed closely by flextime. Britain, Ireland and New Zealand favour flexitime, with flexi-time second favourite. Australia appears to use flexi-time most often, and then flextime and flexitime. However the numbers are fairly small, so the ranking is not necessarily totally reliable.

Given the geographical variation, I don't think either of the versions allowed in Chi (that is, the un-hyphenated ones) could be said to be a common word, especially considering that none of these words are used all that often anyway, as TRex points out. So I'm going to make flexitime and flextime rare, and remove flexitime as a nine-letter seed word.

The fact that flexitime was played by a lot more people than flextime, as MK tells us, would partly be explained by the fact that most players put a lot of effort into getting the niner, and tend to keep struggling with a puzzle until they do. (And, dare I say it, resorting to an anagram site is all too easy when all else fails.) Also there are a lot more players from Australia than anywhere else, and I think flexitime is more familiar here, as Les says.

In conclusion, I'd like to quote one of the few US examples that uses the flexitime version, from the Washington Monthly in 1995:

A 1981 Monthly article detailed a similar trip to the Labor Department to investigate a program called "flexitime," which gave workers greater flexibility in their hours and working conditions. Flexibility proved to be an understatement: Ringing phones were going unanswered as radios blared. Secretaries were reading novels and knitting. A woman padded toward her office in fuzzy bedroom slippers. Nine phone calls to department employees found all of them "out of the office."

If that's what things were like in the Labor Department, imagine what it must have been like in the Relaxation Department.

[Les303]

That sounds fair enough to me.