TOURNEY in yesterday's ROUTINELY Challenge game

[Jacki]

Never heard of TOURNEY - when you press on it to see the meaning it's a tournament (and as a verb it says it's archaic) - the least played common word with 86, next lowest played common word was TYRO with 141 - I think that says it all!. I've learnt a new albeit extremely uncommon word, however I think it needs to be classed as rare.

[TRex]

It might be archaic as a verb, but it is common enough as a noun. The venerable OED places it in Frequency Band 4. The OED ranks words from Band 8 (most common) to Band 1 (least common) and defines Frequency Band 4 as

Band 4 contains words which occur between 0.1 and 1.0 times per million words in typical modern English usage. Such words are marked by much greater specificity and a wider range of register, regionality, and subject domain than those found in bands 8-5. However, most words remain recognizable to English-speakers, and are likely be used unproblematically in fiction or journalism. Examples include overhang, life support, rewrite, nutshell, candlestick, rodeo, embouchure, insectivore (nouns), astrological, egregious, insolent, Jungian, combative, bipartisan, cocksure, methylated (adjectives), intern, sequester, galvanize, cull, plop, honk, skyrocket, subpoena, pee, decelerate, befuddle, umpire (verbs), productively, methodically, lazily, pleasurably, surreptitiously, unproblematically, electrostatically, al dente, satirically (adverbs).

Of the noun examples, I think the first six are definitely common. The seventh and eighth might be debatable, but if I missed them in a Chihuahua puzzle I wouldn't whinge about it as I might if a word from the OED's Band 3 were classified as common and it kept me from a rosette. Here's the OED's explanation of Band 3:

Band 3 contains words which occur between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in typical modern English usage. These words are not commonly found in general text types like novels and newspapers, but at the same time they are not overly opaque or obscure. Nouns include ebullition and merengue, and examples of adjectives are amortizable, prelapsarian, contumacious, agglutinative, quantized, argentiferous. In addition, adjectives include a marked number of very colloquial words, e.g. cutesy, dirt-cheap, teensy, badass, crackers. Verbs and adverbs diverge to opposite ends of the spectrum of use encompassed by this band. Verbs tend to be either colloquial or technical, e.g. emote, mosey, josh, recapitalize.

(But even some of those examples I personally think are common.)

[Jacki]

Thanks TRex I'll bear that in mind next time I have a whinge.

[rogue_mother]

You know, it might be a North American thing. That always seems to bring out the whingeing. There are 644 instances of tourney in the Corpus of Contemporary American English versus 9 (yes, nine!) in the British National Corpus. Not that I picture this word as particularly American, but there you have it.

[TRex]

Hmmm.... I might be whinging about the seed word in the Challenge puzzle for Friday 12 June 2020. Finally found it and it has not been played by many.

Several years ago, Alan wrote about the seed words which were played by the smallest percentage of players. The word I finally got today was on that list — not the smallest percentage, but close to it.

[rogue_mother]

I don't play the Challenge game anymore, but I took a look after your post, TR. I had no trouble figuring it out.

But your remark seems to be a bit of a non sequitur. Shouldn't it have its own topic?

[Greynomad]

Certainly not a common word in my world, TRex, and nor many others including this game if the count is anything to go by.

The next least played common words were played nearly twice as much, there were a dozen or so other uncommon words played more, and I can honestly say I have never seen it used, nor heard it used during my lifetime.

Oh well, live and learn.

As for tourney, I have heard of it, but am not surprised that it’s regional it’s raised questions. It always does, whatever Regions words come up.

[TRex]

I took a look at comparative usage of tourney between UK English and US English with the Ngram Viewer and the usage seems remarkably similar, i.e. it is not an American word little used in the UK.

[mkenuk]

The COD defines tourney as  'a medieval joust';  it refers to activities seen in in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Ivanhoe and the like.

The word has long been familiar to me;
I had always assumed it was an abbreviated form of  tournament but that is not quite true. The two words are related, of course, having a common source in Medieval French, but whereas tournament may be used nowadays of all sorts of competition, tourney seems to refer simply to jousting and the like.

[Jacki]

Three more players found Panegyric than Tourney. Both were under 90.

[TRex]

According to the OED, tourney is used more broadly than just jousting:

1971   Rand Daily Mail (Johannesburg) 4 Sept. 2/9   The Government's new sports policy..has guaranteed a welcome for all teams for next year's Federation Cup tennis tourney.
1976   Star (Sheffield) 3 Dec. 28/8   Last week with the results boosted by the netball tourney..there were 140 results in the Hotline columns.

I think it can be used for most any sports tournament, but — and I'm no sports expert — I suspect some sports use it, such as tennis and netball above, and some don't. I don't recall encountering it in reference to baseball or American 'football'. I think I've heard/seen it used in reference to golf.

[rogue_mother]

I took a look at comparative usage of tourney between UK English and US English with the Ngram Viewer and the usage seems remarkably similar, i.e. it is not an American word little used in the UK.

I totally agree that it's not an *American* word little used in the UK. However, I found the wildly divergent occurrence numbers quite striking. The ngram viewer might not be as accurate a measure, since I think it only includes books. COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and BNC (the British National Corpus) include newspapers, magazines and blogs. The references were to contests in a wide variety of sports, not just jousting.

[TRex]

I think it can be used for most any sports tournament, but — and I'm no sports expert — I suspect some sports use it, such as tennis and netball above, and some don't. I don't recall encountering it in reference to baseball or American 'football'. I think I've heard/seen it used in reference to golf.

It occurred to me that tourney used in sports is probably limited to either one-on-one sports (e.g. netball and tennis) — and then perhaps limited to competitions where a winner advances to the next round and the loser is eliminated — which would be like a jousting tourney, or sports where it is one competing against a field (e.g. golf). It probably would be inappropriate to use tourney for team sports.

[Alan W]

The word tourney happened to pop up in the book I'm currently reading, The Wood Beyond, one of the Dalziel and Pascoe series of crime novels by Reginald Hill:

In appearance the head teacher was far from formidable. With her flowered  dresses, flattish shoes, bare legs, bobbed hair and round, smiling, glowing, almost make-up-less face, she wouldn’t have been out of place at a Betjeman tennis tourney.

I'm not mentioning this as support for the word being considered common. Hill delights in throwing in some very obscure words, such as hydriotaphic earlier in the same book.

[mkenuk]

 Hill delights in throwing in some very obscure words, such as hydriotaphic earlier in the same book.

I could have probably told you what it meant fifty years ago when Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 book on the subject was on my Eng.Lit. syllabus.
I really don't think I've seen the word since then, but, having looked it up, I do see how it might feature in a Dalziel and Pascoe novel!