Q. I am so close to finishing this crossword puzzle! The last clue is 24 Down: "Lecherous looks" – five letters. The first letter is the same as the first letter of 24 Across – Lark. I consult this Web site a lot, and I thought you could help me on this one.

A. The word you are looking for is probably LEERS. You may be interested to know you can do a Crossword search. Once you are in Merriam-Webster Unabridged, choose Advanced Search, and enter the word you are looking for in the Crossword search, using a question mark for the letters you don't know. In this case, the search would have been "L????." Though many of us crossword puzzlers try to not use the crossword search feature, it does come in handy when you get stuck.

Q. Can you please tell me something about the dates of your citations for the verb opine when it's used to mean "hold an opinion"? I'm quite familiar with its meaning of "express an opinion," found in your Collegiate Dictionary. I found the other meaning in your Webster's Third New International, Unabridged, but as that was first published about 45 years ago, I wonder if the "hold an opinion" sense is still in current usage.

This question arose because OPINE was the answer to a recent New York Times crossword clue: "Imagine," leading to some discussions of whether this meaning is accurate. (I recognize that dictionaries often include a word's meaning that hasn't been in fashion for several decades, since readers often encounter text from earlier eras. But my question is about current usage.)

A. As you might expect, in most of our recent (and even not so recent) examples of opine, the meaning is clearly about expressing opinions rather than merely holding them. In some cases, the meaning is ambiguous:

Many opine that a writer, and particularly a poet, for some reason, must love language; often there is even a worshipful attitude assumed. — William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl, 1978

Twenty-four hundred years ago Plato opined that mimesis, impersonation, was a danger to the state; and he has had many supporters in subsequent centuries. — Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, December 11, 1995

In both of the above citations, "hold/held the opinion" substitutes as well as "express(ed) the opinion," but we can assume that in both cases the opinion was both held and expressed.

"I feel" (by which he means he opines) "that Iranian-American immigrants will not be understood fairly if we use the more recent name." — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Harper's, June 1992

There is no immediately obvious and neat Irish equivalent, and I opine that the discovery of this word 'supposed' may have been a factor in the change over to English. — Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien), The Best of Myles, 1968

In these two, it seems likely that "hold(s) the opinion" fits better, but an argument could also be made for the "express" meaning.

...one of our teachers, who is engaged, received a visit from her intended, quite unexpectedly yesterday afternoon & she has gone to her home to show him I opine & will be absent until Saturday." — Emily Dickinson, letter, 17 Feb. 1848, from Selected Letters, 1914

The last one is included just for fun. "Imagine" seems a fine choice here, but a letter from Emily Dickinson is hardly current!

All in all, we can safely say that if the "hold an opinion" meaning has not entirely disappeared from current usage, it is at the very least keeping an extremely low profile — except perhaps in occasional appearances in New York Times crossword puzzles, that is!

Q. Okay, I give up. What makes a fruit a fruit and a vegetable a vegetable? They both grow, don't they?

A. There is no cut-and-dried distinction between the meanings of fruit and vegetable, since a given word's meaning is a product of its usage, and in the case of fruit and vegetable there is a lot of overlap in how these two words are used.

The clearest difference between the two is in the botanical definitions of each word. A fruit is described botanically as "the usually edible reproductive body of a seed plant," while a vegetable is "the edible parts, such as the seeds, leaves, or roots, of herbaceous plants." A vegetable, under this designation, is the edible parts of a plant other than the fruit.

Typical vegetables include peas, cabbage, and beans. In practice, this distinction between the meanings of fruit and vegetable is not always followed, and what foods are called fruits and vegetables is often a product of how they are used and how they taste, rather than their botanical characteristics. An eggplant, for example, is usually thought of as a vegetable even though its edible part is botanically a fruit. So in usage, one might find eggplant described as both a fruit or a vegetable depending on the context in which it is used.