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HUI???

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Raymond Hansen:
Hello,

I'm working on a difficult puzzle and am kind of forced to use HUI - "Muslim ethnic group in China." When I google it, there are over a billion hits, including relatively recent articles about them in Time, The New Yorker, NPR, etc. Yet, it only comes up once in the Cruciverb database (LAT, 2008 (a Sunday puzzle)). Does anyone know why this three-letter combo is pretty much never used?  I could use HUA (still, not a great entry).

- Joe

mmcbs:
I'd guess because most people who do Amercan crosswords don't know what it is. I didn't.

cheapcookies:
HUI or HUA are not great words, but there is a chance one of them can be used if the puzzle is really, really good otherwise. Good wordplay, a neat twist or similar may get a small sin like HUI overlooked.  I cite as an example a recent NYT puzzle that had ASAHI in it. ASAHI is a Japanese brewing company and is not an English word, but there it was in a NYT Sunday puzzle because the rest of the puzzle had a neat twist to it. Now we both know something we didn't before, what HUI and ASAHI mean. And we know enough to avoid them. I'd pull the word from my puzzle dictionary, but feel free to do as you wish.

Bottom line is, you never know until you send it in and are rejected. With the number of constructors growing everyday and the fact that there is a plethora of unpublished puzzles in the que, bear in mind if it doesn't look outstanding to you, it probably isn't.

-cc

axlrosen:
I think that Asahi is far better known to Americans that Hui -- at least to anyone who eats sushi. It's been used 18 times in the NYT.

mmcbs:
I'd just like to add that one reason that HUI gets so many Google hits is that it has a number of meanings (none of which are familiar in American English, IMO). It's an airline code in Vietnam, a borrow word from Maori used in Australia and New Zealand for a meeting or event, name of several Wikipedia-worthy Chinese nobles, surname seen in modern times, ancient Egyptian name, and an anglicized spelling of a Russian profanity.

ASAHI beer can be purchased at Walmart, so that makes it common, though obviously not known by everyone.

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