Disallowed words

[Tom44]

I apologize, I don't recall which puzzle this was for.  Facie was disallowed.  Its basically a legal term meaning "at first glance; on its surface" most commonly used in tandem with prima as in "prima facie evidence."  An example, exceeding the legal blood alcohol limit is prima facie evidence of drunk driving.

And while I know acronyms are not typically allowed, once again let me plead for SETI - that stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  As a science and a science fiction fan I am very aware of SETI and its workings but no one I know actually says the root words.  Instead SETI is used as a word.  Any chance, Alan?

[Alan W]

Tom, "commonly used in tandem with prima" is a bit of an understatement. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 230 instances of facie, and every single one of them is preceded by prima. It's clear that prima facie is part of the English language, but I don't think facie by itself is an English word.

(However, facies is allowed in Chihuahua - it is a term used with various meanings in biology, medicine and geology. The same word is used for both singular and plural.)

SETI was one of the earliest word suggestions I had to deal with. An anonymous player of Letterbox proposed it in 2004! I said no then, not because it's an acronym as such, but because it is written in capital letters. I'm happy to allow an acronym like scuba (originally "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus"), that has morphed into a lower-case spelling, but this doesn't seem to have happened with SETI. So, sorry, Tom, but it doesn't seem to qualify.

[Tom44]

Sorry for the bandwidth Alan.  I seem to come up with an inordinate number of rejected suggestions.  Some of this I attribute to doing a lot of crossword puzzles where you come across a number of unusual words.  Some of it may be just because I love odd words so things seem more common to me than they really are.  Anyway, I do try to moderate myself some.  Thanks for the answers.