dal, here's the thing that actually bothers me about the 1,2,3 rating..

doggo, for instance, you rate as a three. fine. that's where it falls, per your system, in your personal lexicon. so, I imagine, does the word doggery.

okay, here comes my point: doggo has 18 onelook listings; doggery has five onelook listings. to me, these numbers provide a better feeling for the relative obscurity of these two words. let's just for the sake of argument call these their OneLook numbers; doggery is a type 5 and doggo is a type 18 (where the lower number indicates more obscurity). the word 'see' is a type 30, for comparison.

for me, this provides more grist.. and I don't even have to give it too much thought, I just plug it into OneLook and I have a number that suggests *something to me.

BTW, there are several words in the wwftd dictionary which are type 1s by this system. cool