Words found more often in crosswords than in real life
Crossword English is a twisted version of the language. Do enough puzzles and you’ll soon become more familiar with the Italian river the PO and the Sumerian city-state UR than you would ever otherwise have been. In the trade, they’re called crosswordese.
Such words occur more regularly in crosswords than they do in, say, conversation. Some are good at making up parts of other, longer expressions; others fit conveniently into a grid when you need, say, a four-letter word with a vowel at each end, like ASEA, made entirely of very common English-language letters.
Most solvers develop a feel for such words, but web developer and data journalist Noah Veltman went one further and got some figures and lists. Through solving, he had become attached to words such as OLEO and OLIO and started to take an interest in their regular appearance. He took a database of the clues and answers in the New York Times crossword from 1996 to 2012 and compared the frequency with which words appear there with how often they crop up in the same period, but in another context: Google’s database of twenty million books.
One word that doesn’t appear in any of those twenty million books is “crosswordiness,” Veltman’s splendid term to denote a word’s quality of appearing more often in a crossword than in real life—or, at least, one measure of real life.
The constellations with names beginning URSA, the Texan mission the ALAMO, the name NOEL, the spirit ARIEL, the copy editor’s instruction STET, and the ardent desires known as YENS are among those words that score highest. All of them, when judiciously placed in a grid, increase the number of possible words for the entries that cross with them because of the presence of vowels and other oft-seen letters, or of those letters that, like Y, are often found at the end of a word. This also explains why, as crossword constructor, editor, and teacher Don Manley puts it in his Chambers Crossword Manual, you can “expect to find ELEMENT and EVEREST frequently, especially along the edge,” offering a bounty of those Es with which so many other words end.
Part of the job of a crossword editor is to make sure that the “crosswordiest” words don’t become tiresome—and kudos to all the editors for this ongoing fight. But don’t be mistaken: Shunning cliché is not the same as making crossword language the same as our everyday lexicon. Manley continues by asking the solver to forgive the constructors their fillers.
“Learn to regard them,” he advises, “as old friends.” Indeed, many solvers enjoy the discovery of new words through puzzles, and for any familiar entry there will always be a constructor with a fresh way of cluing it. Georges Perec, the French constructor and experimental author, describes well this ever-increasing pressure on the makers of crosswords. In his splendidly titled book Les Mots croisés, procédés de considérations de l’auteur sur l’art et la manière de croiser les mots, he insists that the greatest call on a constructor’s ingenuity is made by the shortest words, those “which hold the grid together.” In French, the old chestnuts include IO, ANA, ENEE, and UTE, all of which would be equally helpful for English-language constructors.
“The constructor makes it a point of honor,” remarks Perec, “to find for each of these a clue that no-one has used before.”
Here’s to that honor, and here are ten of the English language’s most crosswordy words, the unusually shaped faithful friends to constructors, and ones you meet sooner or later in Crosswordland.
ALEE: The lee side of a vessel is the one that’s sheltered from the wind. ALEE can be an adverb meaning “away from the wind” or an order to put the helm toward the lee. It goes back at least as far as the fourteenth century and, as even the most casual fan of medieval alliterative debate poetry can tell you, is to be found in the anonymous poem “Mum and the Sothsegger.”
ARGO: Reimmortalized in Jason and the Argonauts, famous for Ray Harryhausen’s ingenious stop-motion effects, these Greek heroes sailed on the ARGO in search of the Golden Fleece. The entry has also been clued as “Cornstarch brand” after the sauce thickener that may have cannily coined its name so as to appear near the top of alphabetical product lists, but the 2012 Oscars’ Best Picture provides a more contemporary alternative.
ASEA: Hyphenated in the Oxford dictionary and defined as “On the sea, at sea; to the sea,” ASEA also lends itself to misleading definitions via the names of the various bodies of waters, such as in Eugene T. Maleska’s pert clue “In the Black?”
EMU: Words that start and end with a vowel are always useful, and sometimes those vowels just have to be E and U. Alternatives do exist: EAU is used in English as a fancy way of saying “water,” and the European Monetary System once experimented with the ECU as a kind of single currency. But the plump, flightless Australasian bird is the go-to entry when you just have to end a three-letter word with a U. The less frequent appearance of the EMU in crosswords was mourned repeatedly by P. G. Wodehouse (see the chapter PLUM below).
ERATO: The inspiration—if you happen to be an ancient Greek—for lyric love poetry, and far more beloved of crossword constructors than her sister Muses MELPOMENE, TERPSICHORE, or POLYHYMNIA. A favorite ruse of cryptic constructors is to make “muse” appear to be working as the verb meaning “to reflect or to gaze ponderously” when it should be read as a noun, thereby disguising the reference to this desirable five-letter string.
IAMBI: In the Greek, whence it comes, a lampoon, because of the tradition in satirical verse of following a short beat with a long. “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,” wrote Tennyson in the da-dum da-dum form known as iambic pentameter. “Iambus” is the singular term if you’re into analyzing the basic units of poetic rhythm, and two or more of these “feet” are IAMBI. Can also be clued rudely, as with Monk’s “Feet using which I can go either way?”
PSST: If you count Y as a vowel in all but name, there are vanishingly few four-consonant words. CWMS, the plural of a Welsh valley, doesn’t really count since W is standing in as a vowel, as anyone who’s passed a sign reading SNWKER HALL in Cefn y Dyniewyd can testify. TBSP, TSPS, and other terms you might find in recipe books are, of course, available, but if you eschew abbreviations, you’re pretty much left with two interjections: BRRR and PSST.
SMEE: The second-most crosswordy word in Noah Veltman’s analysis, SMEE has changed its role as an answer. Once teasingly depicted in a Punch cartoon in which one duck tells another that she is a SMEE, “only found in crosswords,” the avian type—which may also be a smew, a pochard, a wigeon, or a wagtail—has given way to the pirate who, we are told in Peter Pan, “stabbed without offense,” as in John Lampkin’s Los Angeles Times clue “Barrie baddie.”
SOHO: Or, as it is often rendered, “SoHo,” for the Lower Manhattan neighborhood that’s SOuth of HOuston Street. Its equivalent in London, the boho Soho, is on a site once used for hunting, and named after an Anglo-Norman phrase hollered by huntsmen: “Soho!,” most likely an expression of purely exclamatory origin. SOHO can be also rendered with a hyphen, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (“Run, boy, run, run, and seek him out. / So-ho! so-ho!”) and all in capitals for those who work remotely in a “Small Office Home Office.”
STYE: Edward Moor’s 1823 Suffolk Words and Phrases: or, An Attempt to Collect the Lingual Localisms of That County defines this word as “a troublesome little excrescence or pimple on the eye-lid” and prescribes the application of a gold ring; today, the preferred treatment is a warm compress and some painkillers.
(The crossword is a kind of love letter to the English language. And as we shall see, the affection is mutual . . .)