Jorum in Urban Dictionary

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Some readers will be familiar with the esoteric meaning of Jorum.

I thought it fitting that it should be added to The Urban Dictionary, so I added it.

Look up Jorum in Urban Dictionary.

Puck is being laid to rest today and I found it touching that the earliest use of Jorum, in this respect, was in this comment on a Puck puzzle from July 5th, 2015.

15 comments on “Jorum in Urban Dictionary”

  4. MN@2 you need to scroll down a little. I’m late. Sorry Admin. But I really needed this entry because all I could find was ‘large bowl or jug’ and I have been perplexed for some time.

  7. Matthew Newell @2, that was an article by David Astle (the Oz equivalent of Susie Dent). He sets the Friday crossword every week. Here’s the relevant part of the article.

    “Maybe you know what “jorum” means, but Eileen didn’t. She needed a brainwave, or a few extra letters. The puzzle was an alphabetical jigsaw – a sporadic Guardian format – built by a setter called Puck. The jorum clue read so: Endless task, getting drink for punchbowl? (5)

    Punchbowl, Eileen presumed, defined the answer. This left the wordplay to decode. Cross-letters in the grid were few, the jigsaw format taking time to fill. First you must crack a dozen clues before sussing where answers belong.

    Araucaria, alias Reverend John Graham, pioneered the genre in the 1970s, limiting the matrix to some 26 entries, each answer opening with a new letter. After so much back-and-forth, Eileen knew her punchbowl began with J.

    Endless task was likely to be JO, or JOB minus its tail. So what was that three-letter drink? Ale? Tea? Each beverage held water, but “joale” and “jotea” meant nothing. Next she pondered jorum, feeling a jolt in her brain. Here was the joy of a cryptic clue, that moment you translate the wordplay into an answer you’ve never met.

    Quick clues lack such building blocks. Sourcing the New York Times, I found the typical jorum clue to be: large vessel. Too bad if you’re rusty on crockery, or the Bible, the punchbowl cited in II Samuel when David needed a quaff. Conventional clues give no alternative path to the eureka.

    Eileen was thrilled. It had to be jorum. She shared her buzz on fifteensquared, a British forum musing the papers’ daily cryptics, parsing each clue and debating a puzzle’s merits. Back in 2015, on cracking jorum, Eileen wrote, “Isn’t it satisfying to construct an unlikely-sounding word from the wordplay and then look it up and find out that it does exist?”

    Further, Eileen suggested that any esoteric answer you draw from the wordplay should henceforth be known as a jorum, and the idea stuck. AWETO, say, a Maori caterpillar, was a classic jorum, agreed the forum. The vowel-rich bug appeared in another Guardian puzzle, courtesy of Maskerade………………………………….”

    The last bit isn’t accurate of course as it was Marienkaefer, not Eileen.

  9. Marienkaefer @6 – it’s really good to hear from you, after quite a while, I think. After years of disclaiming credit, I’m so glad that the origin of this use of the word has finally been rightfully attributed. All I did was say that I would follow your lead and thereafter used it whenever I could. Others quite quickly followed suit and it stuck.

    Tim C @7 – many thanks for your comment. I’m fascinated by the entertaining but totally fanciful account of my thought processes as I solved the puzzle, from a man I have never met, on the other side of the world. As you say, the final sentence is totally inaccurate. (I don’t think Susie Dent works like that.)

  10. Thank you Eileen. I am still a keen solver, and read Fifteensquared, but tend to do both in the evening over a glass (not a jorum) of wine, rather than over coffee in the morning as I used to. Something to do with having grandchildren. There are usually so many comments by then that there’s nothing really useful or original I feel I can add.

  13. Marienkaefer (“Ladybird”)@10. What a pleasure to see your name pop up here. You were always one of my favourite contributors. Enjoy your grandchildren. They are only little for such a short time. I have Margot aged almost four and she gives me great joy. So glad you are still in touch with our community even if it’s just as an interested an observer.
    I have loved reading this “Jorum” thread. Thanks to kenmac for initiating it and letting us know about the historic dictionary entry. I love that we have tipped the hat to our dear and much-missed setter Puck RIP on the occasion of his funeral.
    Eileen@9. David Astle is quite a character. His setting is really top notch and sometimes it’s good for us here in Australia to have Australian references incorporated in puzzles such as those set by David Astle (and Liam Runnalls).

  14. Matthew @ 2

    There are websites such as archive.ph or archive.is, which archive snapshots of webpage articles. If you post a link such as yours into the lower field, you may see a snapshot of the article. This is considered OK for personal use, as long as you don’t distribute the link to a wide audience.

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