Afield in yesterday’s AMPLIFIED game

[pat]

My view is that the word should be common but I also think that if a word is on the cusp, so to speak, it's probably safer to leave it as rare. Most people's overall objective in playing the game is to get a rosette and every word changed from rare to common means one more word to find, in any puzzle in which the word can be played, in order to achieve that goal.

As always, Alan, you can't please all the people all the time.

[les303]

Well said, Pat.

[pat]

Interesting to note that aright was played by about a quarter of the players in the hamstring game, the same proportion that played afield in the amplified game. Aright is classified as common, afield as rare. If anything, I think it should be the other way round.

[Alan W]

Pat's thinking about aright is certainly persuasive. The word's used much less often than afield, and is somewhat dated and/or dialectal. In international corpora, many of the occurrences of aright are in Nigerian or Pakistani publications. My guess is that this stems from the use of the word in some English translations of the Koran.

In future aright will be treated as rare.

And what about afield? I'll bow to popular opinion and make it common. And try to remember to play it next time the letters come up!

[Jacki]

Great news! It’s like ELAND, always a thrill when I can play it.
As for ARIGHT, I always thought it was a seafaring term, obviously I’m on the wrong track.