穿る vs ほじる vs ほじくる


In wondering how to expressing the act of picking one's nose in Japanese I
came across the following term or terms:

穿る / ほじる / ほじくる

I got the feeling from WWWJDIC that the two hiragana are synonymous but
differently sounding readings of the one kanji term. And further that the
kanji spelling itself is not used currently.

Is this correct? Or are ほじる and ほじくる different in some way? Should 穿る be used
or avoided?




I searched [_The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese
(BCCWJ)_](http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/) using the freely accessible 少納言
tool. I found the following results:

[code]

      (はな|鼻)を?ほじ[ら-ろっ]　　　　8 results
      (はな|鼻)を?ほじく[ら-ろっ]　　　4 results
      (はな|鼻)を?穿[ら-ろっ]　　　　　0 results
    
[/code]

To explain the above, and to explain how to reproduce these results:

  1. I used the regular expression pattern `(はな|鼻)を?$` in the 前文脈 ("preceding context") field to mean "search term is preceded by はな or 鼻 optionally followed by を". 
  2. I used the regular expression pattern `^[ら-ろっ]` in the 後文脈 ("following context") field to mean "search term is followed by any hiragana in the /r/ row or small っ".
  3. For the search term itself, in which regular expressions are not allowed, I used `ほじ`, `ほじく`, and `穿` respectively. 

The results I found are fairly small in number, but if they reflect wider
usage accurately, they indicate that the most common collocation is 鼻をほじる--
although 鼻をほじくる is used as well--and they indicate that neither ほじる nor ほじくる
is commonly written in kanji in this phrase. (In all twelve results, I found
that 鼻 was written in kanji, not kana.)

Based on this, I recommend writing 鼻をほじる in this particular context.




I searched [_The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese
(BCCWJ)_](http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/) using the freely accessible 少納言
tool. I found the following results:

[code]

      (はな|鼻)を?ほじ[ら-ろっ]　　　　8 results
      (はな|鼻)を?ほじく[ら-ろっ]　　　4 results
      (はな|鼻)を?穿[ら-ろっ]　　　　　0 results
    
[/code]

To explain the above, and to explain how to reproduce these results:

  1. I used the regular expression pattern `(はな|鼻)を?$` in the 前文脈 ("preceding context") field to mean "search term is preceded by はな or 鼻 optionally followed by を". 
  2. I used the regular expression pattern `^[ら-ろっ]` in the 後文脈 ("following context") field to mean "search term is followed by any hiragana in the /r/ row or small っ".
  3. For the search term itself, in which regular expressions are not allowed, I used `ほじ`, `ほじく`, and `穿` respectively. 

The results I found are fairly small in number, but if they reflect wider
usage accurately, they indicate that the most common collocation is 鼻をほじる--
although 鼻をほじくる is used as well--and they indicate that neither ほじる nor ほじくる
is commonly written in kanji in this phrase. (In all twelve results, I found
that 鼻 was written in kanji, not kana.)

Based on this, I recommend writing 鼻をほじる in this particular context.

