I hopped from a link Deb Amlen posted on Facebook to Noah Veltman’s list of the “Crosswordiest Words” in the 1996–2012 New York Times crossword. The frequency of the crossword entries (excluding proper nouns and multi-word answers) were measured against the Google Books Ngram for the same time period, and entries that appear more often in the crossword than in books have a higher score. So if I include ASEA, SMEE, SNEE, ALEE, EGAD, STET, ALIT, OLEO, CEE, ASPS, APER, ALP, EMOTE, OLIO, STYE, ONER, SLOE, ARF, RANI, STENO, and ESSES (and so on, and so on!) in the lists of entries I didn’t like in various puzzles, there’s data supporting my contention that these words are pretty obscure in common usage.
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