Yesterday’s Peninsular ten letter challenge game

[Jacki]

Unsnarl common? Is it even a word? I’ve got to say I was gobsmacked to see it revealed in the solution. I would like to suggest it be reclassified as not even a word! Not very good English, sorry.

[mkenuk]

To snarl (up) is a word I've heard often enough meaning 'to get entangled'.
I've also heard it used for a traffic jam - 'snarled up at the roadworks on King Street'.
So, 'unsnarl' is the opposite - 'to disentangle'.
Common? I would say probably not.

[pat]

Definitely not common and played by only 20 out of 311 people. I missed a rosette by three words, two of which I should have seen and this one. If I'd sat there until Christmas I wouldn't have got unsnarl!

[Alan W]

I don't quite understand why you think unsnarl is not very good English, Jacki. It's in most dictionaries. Wiktionary defines it as "To remove or undo a snarl or tangle". An example of its use is from a Washington Post article about the ship that blocked the Suez Canal earlier this year:

It also could take close to another week to unsnarl the traffic jam of hundreds of other ships and tankers waiting to make the same passage.

Could anybody honestly say they would have been puzzled reading that sentence?

However, I agree it's not a common word, so it will be classed as rare in future, as will unsnarled.

[Jacki]

Lots of words are in dictionaries that sound wrong. Like deader and deadest. I think another player said surely dead should be the end of it!

[mkenuk]

'Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.'

This is from the second paragraph of Charles Dickens' 'Christmas Carol'. The narrator has just told us that 'Marley was dead as a door-nail'.

Poets and other great writers can, and very often do, play with words, as Dickens is doing here for comic effect.

Should such words be common? That's up to Alan.