Greek letters

[Tom44]

So what is the rule on the Greek alphabet?  Without checking I assume alpha, beta, delta, gamma, sigma are common as is epsilon and, I am sure, omega.  But just discovered upsilon isn't.  I've stopped worrying about the common/uncommon conundrum because its clear whatever is used to make that distinction does not fit my lexicon very well.  So not taking a position, just wondering why upsilon isn't treated like the others.

[2dognight]

  My thoughts exactly

[Alan W]

The issue of the Greek alphabet has come up before. The latest time, I think, I wrote:

There are several goals which can be aimed for in deciding such issues - and they tend to be in conflict with each other. There is the goal of consistency. There is the goal of minimising the likelihood that a player will miss playing a common word because they've never heard of it. And I've recently been drawn to the Hippocratic goal of doing no harm - that is, leaving things as they are unless it seems certain a change will improve things.

On the current question, when the Greek letter names were first discussed in 2009, I commented that it was hard to know where to draw the line between common and rare in the Greek alphabet. Hence, I achieved consistency by changing zeta from rare to common. All the other letter names long enough for the puzzle, including omicron, were already common.

But when omicron last appeared in a daily puzzle, on 12 August, only 59 people played it: about one seventh of the players that day. It's hard to know how to interpret that, because it's a tricky word to think of, even if you know the word. But it seems likely that some players simply were not familiar with the word. Word usage frequencies show that omicron and upsilon are used far less often than any of the other members of the Greek alphabet. And I don't think those two words have any non-technical uses, except in relation to the fraternity societies, etc, in the US.

I conclude that omicron and upsilon should be rare in future. I'm not sure about some of the others, such as zeta, but applying the "do no harm" principle, I'll leave them as common until I'm persuaded otherwise.