Crossword clue
Hackneyed crossword clue
8 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "hackneyed", from as short as 5 letters up to 11, grouped below by the length of your slot.
Written by Blake Boege
Answers by length
Read the row that matches your slot. BANAL is the shortest answer here and COMMONPLACE the longest.
| Letters | Answers |
|---|---|
| 5 |
|
| 8 |
|
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
|
What this list looks like
Length 5 carries 4 answers, the largest group on this page.
Which one does the setter mean?
Five squares is TRITE, with BANAL a close second. Both are five letters and both are correct, so the crossing letters decide it. TRITE tends to be the answer in American puzzles and BANAL in British ones.
How these differ
TRITE and BANAL both mean worn out by repetition, but BANAL adds a note of dullness while TRITE adds a note of insincerity: a trite condolence is one the speaker did not mean. STOCK describes a phrase kept ready for use, as in a stock response. TIRED, SHOPWORN, TIMEWORN and THREADBARE are all metaphors from cloth and goods, describing an idea that has been handled too often. COMMONPLACE is the mildest of them and merely means ordinary. Hackneyed itself comes from the hackney, a horse for hire, ridden by anyone and therefore worn out.
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
This is a dictionary answering a question, not a copied answer key. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “hackneyed” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 7 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 "hackneyed"?
- There is more than one. 8 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Five squares is TRITE, with BANAL a close second. Both are five letters and both are correct, so the crossing letters decide it. TRITE tends to be the answer in American puzzles and BANAL in British ones.
- How many letters is the answer to "hackneyed"?
- Anything from 5 to 11. The length with the most candidates is 5. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
- How reliable are these answers?
- 7 of the 8 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.