Crossword clue
Commotion crossword clue
27 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "commotion", from as short as 3 letters up to 14, grouped below by the length of your slot.
Written by Blake Boege
Answers by length
10 different lengths answer this one. Yours is whichever row matches the squares in the grid.
| Letters | Answers |
|---|---|
| 3 |
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| 4 |
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| 5 |
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| 6 |
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| 7 |
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| 8 |
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| 9 |
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| 10 |
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| 11 |
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| 14 |
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What this list looks like
If your slot is 6 wide you have the most to choose from, with 8 candidates.
The short ones are worth learning: DIN, ADO at 3 letters, which is where a setter goes when the grid is tight.
10 of these mean the same as the clue and 17 are kinds of it, which is a distinction worth holding on to when two look equally good.
Which one does the setter mean?
Three squares almost always means ADO. It is the shortest word in English for a fuss made over very little, which is exactly why setters reach for it, and it has been a crossword staple for a century. If the three squares will not take ADO, try DIN, which is the noise rather than the fuss.
How these differ
These divide into noise and disorder. DIN, UPROAR, RACKET and TUMULT are about volume. ADO, FUSS and BUSTLE are about activity and pointlessness, with ADO carrying a hint that the fuss was not warranted. RUCKUS, RUMPUS and KERFUFFLE add a comic edge and usually involve people falling over each other. STORM, TEMPEST, UPHEAVAL and EARTHQUAKE borrow from weather and geology for something larger and more serious. GARBOIL is archaic and turns up almost nowhere except puzzles.
Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have
Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.
Where these answers come from
Worth saying where this list comes from. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “commotion” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 19 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.
Common questions
- What is the answer to the crossword clue "commotion"?
- There is more than one. 27 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Three squares almost always means ADO. It is the shortest word in English for a fuss made over very little, which is exactly why setters reach for it, and it has been a crossword staple for a century. If the three squares will not take ADO, try DIN, which is the noise rather than the fuss.
- How many letters is the answer to "commotion"?
- Anything from 3 to 14. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
- How reliable are these answers?
- 19 of the 27 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.