Signboard

[pat]

The seed word in yesterday's standard puzzle, which roughly half of the 642 players got. I was one of them, trying it in hope rather than expectation as it's not a word I'm familiar with. The dictionary says it's a US word so I'm wondering if it should actually be classed as common given that words that are country-specific generally aren't.

[jem01060]

from the OED: "1688 R. Holme Acad. Armory iii. 102/1 –– A Chandler … Dipping of a Staff or Rod of Candles in Tallow … I have seen often times Painted on Sign-boards, to signifie the dwelling-house of a Chandler." Randle Holme (1627-1700) was a herald painter in Chester. To me, signboard is a common word; moreover, no synonym comes immediately to mind.

[ridethetalk]

The seed word in yesterday's standard puzzle, which roughly half of the 642 players got. I was one of them, trying it in hope rather than expectation as it's not a word I'm familiar with. The dictionary says it's a US word so I'm wondering if it should actually be classed as common given that words that are country-specific generally aren't.

I'm with you on this, Pat - I would have thought adsorbing to be more common...

[matt]

The seed word in yesterday's standard puzzle, which roughly half of the 642 players got. I was one of them, trying it in hope rather than expectation as it's not a word I'm familiar with. The dictionary says it's a US word so I'm wondering if it should actually be classed as common given that words that are country-specific generally aren't.

I got "adsorbing" fairly quickly, and was surprised that it wasn't the common word. At the time, looking at the scoreboard it was a sea of green stars with very few yellow ones.

Like you, I tried "signboard" because it was all that I could come up with rather than because I really thought it was a word, let alone common. I suspect that we are not alone in this and that the number of people who got it in the end was significantly influenced by people's persistence in trying to find a "common" word rather because they knew it.

[Greynomad]

Isn’t the game strange.

Signboard didn’t surprise me as a word when I found it.

Had the game included absorbing, I would have been surprised if it was not common.

Adsorbing though was a totally new, and rare word to me.

[Jacki]

Ditto Greynomad

[Alan W]

Like Greynomad and Jacki, I would have thought signboard was a fairly common word, and adsorbing quite uncommon.

Wiktionary identifies signboard as a US word, but other dictionaries, British and American, have no regional usage note. Trying to get a handle on international usage, I found to my surprise that the word is used much more often in English-language publications in Asian countries than in any of the "core" English speaking territories:



Regarding jem's comment that no synonym comes to mind, just after this topic was posted I was reading a novel (The Coffin Trail, by Martin Edwards) and saw this sentence on the first page of Chapter 1: "A mile further on stood a wooden sign with worn lettering." Then on the next page I saw: "A board freshly painted in a blinding shade of yellow bragged that Tarn Cottage 'presented outstanding potential for sensitive refurbishment'." So it seems that in some contexts either sign or board can be used with the same meaning as signboard.

Bearing in mind the comments of those forumites who hadn't heard of the word, and its relative rarity of use in many locations, I'll make it rare for the future.

As for adsorbing, it's quite a technical term, from adsorb, meaning according to the Collins dictionary:

to undergo or cause to undergo a process in which a substance, usually a gas, accumulates on the surface of a solid forming a thin film, often only one molecule thick

I'm convinced it's correctly classified as rare.

[pat]

Good decision, Alan.