A Fair Definition of Crosswordese

Here's how we can define crosswordese without bias.

Wikipedia defines "crosswordese" as "a term generally used to describe words frequently found in crossword puzzles but seldom found in everyday conversation". IMO, a better way of defining crosswordese is as "a term generally used to describe answers found in crossword puzzles but are foreign to a large percentage of intelligent adults." Mostly the same thing, but there are some major differences which I feel get to the heart of what crosswordese is. Many words are seldom spoken, but that does not make it an obscure word. In addition, crosswordese does not have to be words (e.g. TKO), and intelligent adults should be a good measurement of the population.

Crosswordese, using the definition I've given above, has two parts:

1) It's used in a crossword puzzle (DUH!)

2) It is foreign to a large percentage of intelligent adults.


As an example, I recently did a online survey polling people of about middle age and asking them "Do you know what an aleut is?"

Results are shown below.

NO
YES
NO
NO
YES
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
YES
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
YES
NO
NO
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO (33 entries)

6 YESes out of 33. Assuming my data was perfectly unbiased, that gives me a 95% confidence interval of about 5%-31%.

So is ALEUT crosswordese?

1) It's used in a crossword puzzle: YES
2) It is foreign to a large percentage of intelligent adults: We can't be certain, but the data strongly suggests YES.

Now let's assume that a puzzle has 5 pieces of crosswordese, all known by only 30% of the population.



The chance of not knowing all 5 is 16.807%. (about 1 in 6 people!)

The chance of knowing 1 in 5 is 36.015%

The chance of knowing 2 in 5 is 30.87%

The chance of knowing 3 in 5 is 13.23%

The chance of knowing 4 in 5 is 2.835%

The chance of knowing all 5 is 0.243%. That's less than 1 in 400 people!



With just 5 entries, at least half the people would know 1 entry or less, and over 83% of people would not know at least 3 entries!

Given the hundreds of crosswordese in puzzles, it will take a new person  a significant amount of time before they can even begin to solve puzzles. A line from a Marc Romano book says, "to do well solving crosswords, you absolutely need to keep a running mental list of “crosswordese”.

Here's wishing that wasn't the case.