Bruit

[pat]

Is bruit really a common word (Standard puzzle, 28th July)? It's not a word I know at all.

[TRex]

It was also new to me. I had to look it up to learn what it meant.

[nineoaks]

Although I wouldn't want this bruited about the Chihuahua community, I must admit that this word is familiar to me and I am glad it is classed with the common words.

9Oaks

[ensiform]

My two cents: I've known this word for years.  On a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is "the" and 10 is "quaesitum," I'd rate "bruit" a 6.  Just a scintilla into uncommon territory.

[Alan W]

It seems to me to be a border-line case.

One reason bruit may seem unfamiliar is that it appears mostly in the form bruited. For example, in the LA Times of 20 April: "The stated reasoning behind this bruited change..." (about a rumour that the TV Theme Music category was to be dropped from the Emmy Awards).

But the word does appear in its uninflected form at times. For example in Portrait of Johnny, a 2006 biography of songwriter Johnny Mercer: "It was the hypocrisy of a later time to bruit it about that Frank Sinatra 'associated with gangsters.'"

Bruit can also be used as a noun, including as a medical term for an abnormal sound heard through a stethoscope, but this is too specialised to help its cause as a common word.

In favour of bruit being considered common is that it appears in most dictionaries, even quite small ones, and examples can be found in many books and periodicals, including Time magazine, the LA Times, the Times from the UK and the Australian.

On the other hand, there is evidence that the word is declining in usage. The Corpus of Contemporary American English shows the usage frequency of bruited declining in each five-year period since 1990. The Time magazine index shows usage of bruited peaking in the first decade, the 1920s. And the recently released Corpus of Historical American English shows bruited peaking in the 1850s, at 0.95 occurrences per million, and shrinking to 0.03 per million in the 2000s. (The 1850s examples included Moby Dick and an Edgar Allan Poe story.) These results are all from small samples, but their agreement with each other seems significant.

So, I'm in two minds about whether bruit, and its inflections, should remain as common words. It would be interesting to hear from other forumites about this one.

[Linda]

It's as common as hens' teeth as far as I'm concerned, Alan.    

[rogue_mother]

I'm familiar with bruit/bruited, but I checked with Rogue Daughter #1 for another opinion. She does not know these words at all. Since she is smarter and more educated than her mother, this would seem to indicate that the words should no longer be considered common.

[anonsi]

Like Rogue Daughter #1, I have never heard of them.

Edit: Unlike Rogue Daughter #1, I am not smarter, and potentially not more educated than RM.

[birdy]

I'm familiar with it, though it's certainly not one I'd use every day, or even week.

[biggerbirdbrain]

Having studied French, the word was familiar to me, as it was from literature. It all depends on your standard for common/rare that I have still yet to fathom entirely, OGAGL! Common today, rare tomorrow?

[Alan W]

It seems like it would be preferable to change it to rare, given that quite a few people were unfamiliar with it. I'll do that, and the same for its various inflections of course.