Syce
This puzzle provides 26 potential words. Each word must have at least 4 letters in it, and must include the central letter, in this case 'Y'.
I work on a Polygon puzzle each morning and when I have exhausted my vocabulary, I look at the solution. Sometimes, the words are so obvious that I wonder how I’ve managed to be blind to them. At many other times, unknown words crop up and ‘syce’ is one that appeared recently.
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A syce holding two carriage horses
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
It is pronounced as spelt, and is an archaic Urdu term for a groom. A syce was a servant, notably in India, during British colonial rule in the seventeenth century, whose responsibilities included feeding, grooming, and saddling horses, and driving carriages. It was in use before the advent of the car, at a time when horse transport was common.
When cars later became more available, syce developed to mean chauffeur, a driver of the ‘horseless carriage.’
Surely that word is scraping the bottom of the linguistic barrel to get the word count up on that puzzle. What non-17th-century person would know that in 2025?
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