Nucleate - common?

[mkenuk]

re the petulance standard game

nucleate was played by 63 from 712, approximately 8.8% of those taking part.

When you look at some of the supposedly 'rare' words that got far more hits (luna? / lunate? / caul?), you have to wonder why nucleate is classified as 'common'.

There were far fewer rosettes than normal in this game.
However, with words like pentacle and the 'American' spelling of epaulet (plus nucleate of course) perhaps it's just surprising there were so many!

 

[Jacki]

Funnily enough I played nucleate before epaulet. Epaulet was my last word. I'm much more familiar with seeing it spelt as epaulette.

[TRex]

According to the Ngram Viewer, in U.S. English, epaulette is as common (and maybe a wee bit more used) as epaulet.

Sometimes the 'American' spelling is definitely less common in the U.S., e.g. epilogue versus epilog

[Calilasseia]

My understanding is that while nucleate appears pretty frequently in certain scientific papers, it's not a regular occurrence in colloquial speech.

[Roddles]

My understanding is that while nucleate appears pretty frequently in certain scientific papers, it's not a regular occurrence in colloquial speech.

But as I understand it, the criterion for being classed as common in Chihuahua is that it is a word that would be known to a reasonably well-read person, not just one that is used in colloquial speech. Otherwise we would not only be eliminating words like smote, doth, etc, but also words from science that we know and understand, but that wouldn't be classed as colloquial speech. For me, nucleate falls in that class. I'd hate to see Chihuahua dumbed down to much.

[mkenuk]

As a non-scientist, I certainly have no problem with nucleus ['the core of an atom'] and the adjective nuclear being common.

Nucleate however is a term from Biology and I suspect it's far less well known than nuclear.

The number of 'hits' that a word receives in a game is not an infallible guide to whether a word should be common or not, but it usually serves to identify those words which might be considered 'borderline'. Certainly the 'commonness' of any word played by less than 10% of the total number of players should, I feel, be queried.

[Alan W]

I take Roddles's point, but I imagine quite a few Chi players would neither know nor understand nucleate. The word seldom appears in non-technical publications, and even when it does, it's generally in a scientific context. An example was in a Guardian article in 2013:

According to the study, hydrated iron-oxide (ferrihydrite) crystals first nucleate on a fiber-like chitinous (complex sugar) organic template.

The least technical example I could find of the use of this word was in the heading of a 2011 New York Times editorial marking the centenary of Rutherford's "solar system" model of the atom: "A Nucleated Century".

Nucleate can be both an adjective (= "having a nucleus") and a verb (= "form a nucleus"). Currently nucleated is also common, but nucleating is rare. I think on balance that nucleate and nucleated should become rare.