Monday 15 May 7-by-many COOKHOUSE puzzle

[ridethetalk]

CHOOKHOUSE – a place where hens hang out... https://www.wordsense.eu/chookhouse/

CHOKOES – plural of choko https://www.wordsense.eu/chokoes/ which is allowed but rare...

[pat]

CHOOKHOUSE – a place where hens hang out... https://www.wordsense.eu/chookhouse/

I didn't even get cookhouse, along with 100 other players. I'm not suggesting it should be made rare as 227 players did get the word, but it's not one I've ever come across. It's something I'd call a kitchen. 

[Ozzyjack]

A cookhouse is a detached or outdoor shelter for cooking while a kitchen is a room equipped for preparing meals¹. So, the main difference between the two is that a cookhouse is usually outdoors and detached from the main house while a kitchen is indoors and part of the house..

[pat]

I did actually look up the word when I saw it in the solution. I guess its meaning is obvious really. When I was playing the puzzle I wondered if the word might be something-house. Since so many people didn't get it, I wonder if some of those who did had the same thought and tried cookhouse.

[blackrockrose]

I only knew cookhouse because my father served in the British army in WWII, and used to sing this song to us in the 1950s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JERbAk3ROjc

[jancsika]

I've never seen chookhouse or chook before but funnily the Hungarian word for hen is tyúk. I wonder if that's just a coincidence?

I did get one word rejected and that was shucks (as in "Aw, shucks!"). In fact until now I don't think I've seen "shuck" before...

[yelnats]

I was meaning to ask why chookhouse wasn't accepted as chookhouses are much more common (in Oz anyway) than cookhouses !

But then autocorrect just changed chookhouse to cookhouse.

Chook comes from British dialect chuck(y) 'a chicken; a fowl' which is a variant of chick. Chook is the common term for the live bird, although chook raffles, held in Australian clubs and pubs, have ready-to-cook chooks as prizes.
https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au › centres

[Alan W]

Chook is an informal term for a chicken in Australia and New Zealand. It's accepted in Chihuahua as a rare word. Hence a chookhouse is a henhouse.

It seems to be most frequently written as two words. It's listed by a few of the Oxford dictionaries, including their Australian and NZ dictionaries, but only as a two-word expression. The Macquarie Dictionary lists it as chook house, but allows for chookhouse as a variant. On the other hand Wiktionary has it as a single word, with no reference to a two-word form.

The word appears in both forms in Australian and NZ publications. Although the two-word version seems more frequent, chookhouse is sometimes used by news media and novelists - Wiktionary cites Peter Carey. I'll add it as a rare word.

[ridethetalk]

Thanks, Alan...

[Alan W]

Like its anagram chook, choko is a word most commonly used in Australia and New Zealand. The vegetable is known by other names in other places, including chocho and chayote (both accepted as rare words).

The word is most commonly pluralized as chokos. I didn't see the variant chokoes in any dictionary other than Wiktionary. I was leaning towards pronouncing it too obscure, but then I saw that spelling on the websites of Australia's two major supermarket chains, as well as other retailers. I conclude the word has enough currency to justify acceptance as a rare word.

[ridethetalk]

Thanks, Alan...