Emote, elate, and elan. Aerie, eerie, and adit. Those probably aren’t words you use in your everyday vocabulary – unless you’ve done a crossword puzzle recently.

The above six are in multitudes of puzzles every day, along with other standbys and puzzle designer workarounds. Their popularity, of course, is directly related to the structure of the English language; look at all those vowels.

Crosswords rely on these a lot, probably too much. Case in point: Monday, February 25. Examples of every trick in the crossword book showed up in three different papers.

The Daily’s Monday puzzle included both emote and elate. Aerie showed up in both the Daily and USA Today. The New York Times and USA Today both relied on eerie. (Another word high on the list is Erie, which gets alternating clues of “Great Lake” and “Indian tribe.”)

The dozens of times these words are written in the squares is nowhere near their usage percentage in real life. “Chew the scenery,” (Daily, 20 Across) to which the inexperienced might answer ham up or act up is, of course, emote. I saw that word once in a comic strip, but never anywhere else. This makes the ratio of crosswords-to-real-life use about . sixty to one. If that. Crosswords really do have a vocabulary of their own.

If you don’t know that eagles live in an aerie (Daily, 62 Across; USA Today, 32 Down), the fancy word for “fish eggs” (Daily, 64 Down) is roe, or that a “summer cooler” (Times, 8 Down) is an ade, do a puzzle or two. It will be obvious soon enough. (Adit, by the way, is a mine entrance.)

Sometimes the answer won’t be obvious, even to those well-versed in crosswords. I did one puzzle in which an across clue was “Age” and a down clue was also “Age.” The answers, though, were different words – era and eon. Now there’s proof of laziness in clue-writing. The crossword people should try and have a little more elan – I mean, elegance or vigor – when making these clues and answers. Until they do, though, we’ll be stuck with the same clues over and over. Good to fill in the puzzle but bad to challenge the mind.

Names are no better, ranging from common and overused to practically obscure. “Yellow Brick Road Traveler” (USA Today, 56 Across) Toto travels on crosswords almost daily. “Football great Graham” (Daily, 8 Down) Otto also occasionally makes appearances. But then oddball questions like “1946-52 NL home run leader” (Daily, 68 Across,) Kiner will pop up, and everyone but the die-hard sports fan is at a loss.

Or you get a runaround, with the clue favoring the lesser-known over the first impulse. “Florida explorer” (Daily, 46 Across) is not De Leon, who searched for the Fountain of Youth, but De Soto, who also explored the state but does not come first to mind.

And then there are the alternate spellings. “One of the Pillars of Islam” (USA Today, 3 Down) may not be a hajj, but a hadj. Another often-used trick is “Indian garment,” which depending on the need is either sari or saree.

There are even crossword competitions, and skills for these go far beyond just having a crossword vocabulary. While many people fill in the puzzles with capital letters, a 1998 Reader’s Digest article said the “hard-core” competitors use a “little-e technique”, which “may save a whopping six seconds.” It also said Bill Clinton used this technique while he did the Times’ Sunday puzzle “in about 20 minutes – in ink, with no mistakes.” Only the foolish – or the highly skilled – would think of doing the Sunday New York Times puzzle without being able to erase.

Sunday’s Times puzzle may be the ultimate cruciverbalist’s challenge. It is said the Times’ puzzle starts out easy on Monday and gets harder, working up to the complicated monster that appears on Sunday. Even those puzzles, though, may still give you “___ Moines” or “Hawkeye State,” two widespread clues with a local flavor.

OK, one more clue left. “Iowa college town.” Four letters. This one might be tricky.

Jeff Morrison is a sophomore in journalism and political science from Traer. He is a copy editor for the Daily.