There is some evidence that
tourney is used differently in the US from in the UK, Australia, etc. Some British published dictionaries define the word as relating exclusively to knightly tournaments, but others define it as another word for
tournament, in all senses.
In any case, the word is used by newspapers around the English-speaking world for contemporary tournaments, in various sports, in chess, in contract bridge and in computer gaming. In 2011 the Melbourne
Age had the headline "Malaysian tourney to test Kookas", the Kookaburras being the Australian men's hockey team. In 2008 the BBC News website headed a story "Nigeria late for Malaysia tourney". A 2017 rugby story in
The Irish News, from Northern Ireland, reported:
Just one win in the current Inter-Pro campaign would have secured an automatic place, now relegation to the junior European Conference tourney seems inevitable.
It's certainly true that tourney is used more frequently in US publications than in Britain, especially in news reports. In the News on the Web corpus the word has 1.51 occurrences per million in the US, and 0.23 per million in the UK. But neither of these figures represents extreme rarity. Compare the frequency numbers for
panegyric in the same corpus: 0.02 in the US and 0.03 in the U.K.
The word also appears in books, including by British authors. I mentioned in an earlier post its use by Reginald Hill. Wiktionary supplies an example from
Jeeves in the Offing, by P.G. Wodehouse:
Kipper stood blinking, as I had sometimes seen him do at the boxing tourneys in which he indulged when in receipt of a shrewd buffet on some tender spot like the tip of the nose.
In fact, Wodehouse used the word in several books.
I'm going to leave
tourney as a common word, but switch
panegyric to rare.