Steve's responses to the last post were small enough to fit comfortably in the comments box, but my follow-up is not.

Well, I can hardly criticize, since I'm the one who raised the question in the first place.

Aside from the ones already mentioned in the original post, I ought to have seen sniffed and wronged.

The Scrabble dictionary also accepts trollied, trigged, woolled, and vroomed. The latter is the past tense of vroom, which means just what you'd expect it does, though you might be forgiven for questioning its legitimacy even as an interjection, much less a verb. Trollied and woolled are alternate spellings of trolleyed and wooled, which mean "conveyed by trolley" and "having wool". Trigged is the past tense of the verb trig, which OSPD, in its characteristically dense way, defines as "to make trig", obliging you to lift your eyes to the line above where trig the adjective is defined as "neat".

SOWPODS will also accept troolie, soogeed, and snigged. None of them turn up on Chambers' online dictionary, so I can only guess what they might be alleged to mean. Likewise for poongee, which even SOWPODS rejects.

Steve again:

Now that you mention it, I do remember noticing beefily, once upon a time. Whoever came up with the factoid about billowy must have either overlooked or rejected it, but it's a reasonable word, if perhaps unlikely to occur in actual writing or conversation.

None of the others are acknowledged in SOWPODs, which as far as I'm concerned is more than sufficient to prove them non-words.

OSPD stands for the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, which you might have seen in book stores. When I refer to "the Scrabble dictionary", I generally mean the OSPD, though I often blur the distinction between the OSPD and TWL.

TWL stands for "Tournament Word List", which is the official standard for what is legal in Scrabble in tournaments held in the United States, Canada and a couple of other countries. TWL is closely based on OSPD but with a few modifications.

For one thing, the OSPD includes only words of eight letters or less (plus their derivatives). Since you only have seven tiles to play, it's rare that you'll form a word longer than eight letters. Rare, but not impossible. If your opponent plays TOOTH, you might add four letters to the end and make it TOOTHPICK. Obviously that should be a legal play, but toothpick isn't listed in the OSPD. And so TWL includes all legal words up to 15 letters. (Anything longer than that wouldn't fit on the board.)

The other significant difference is that TWL includes all the naughty words. The publishers of OSPD wanted to market the book to schools and families, and they felt it would hinder them in doing so if the kids could look up words like shit and cunt. So with the fourth edition all the words with no non-vulgar meanings were eliminated, along with a few dozen other words deemed offensive (including the game-useful abo and lez, and the seemingly innocuous fatso). Scrabble players have no such qualms, of course, so TWL restores these expurgated words.

Finally, I believe TWL corrects for some minor errata -- printing errors and the like. There were many of these in the first edition, but I think the current OSPD is pretty accurate.

Scrabble in Britain developed a different official list, called OSW for Official Scrabble Words. Official play in Britain does not use OSW alone, however. At some point they made a decision to allow any word that is listed in OSW or TWL. This union of word lists is known as SOWPODS (an anagram of OSW+OSPD), and SOWPODS is now the official standard for Britain and almost everywhere else in the world where they play Scrabble in the English language. (If I recall correctly, the two other nations which use TWL instead of SOWPODS, besides the United States and Canada, are Israel and Thailand.)

SOWPODS is, by definition, a broader collection than TWL, since all of TWL is included in it. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that OSW alone is also broader than OSPD. OSPD already includes British spellings like honour and Scottish words like nae, so it's not just a matter of adding British spellings. The difference is that OSW uses more liberal sources. Or rather, I should say, source, since it's really just one dictionary we're talking about: the notoriously promiscuous Chambers Dictionary. Whereas most dictionaries attempt to reflect the language as it is, Chambers as part of its marketing boasts of its quirky eccentricity and inclusion of obscure words.

At one point there was a movement in the North American Scrabble community urging that United States clubs adopt SOWPODS. The reasoning was that American Scrabble champions are at a disadvantage in international events because they have to memorize two different word lists. (Isn't that the same argument they use for extending copyright terms indefinitely?) Thankfully, reason prevailed and America stuck with the TWL.

I count myself among those who believe that even the TWL is too inclusive. That's a nuanced position, because one must always argue against the naive newbies who are shocked to find in OSPD all sorts of unfamiliar words which really are good words, just ones that the newbie doesn't happen to know. OSPD isn't nearly as bad as those folks make it out to be. Nevertheless, there are serious flaws in its methodology, and the nature of those flaws is such that it often errs on the side of including words that ought to excluded but rarely if ever the reverse.

But that's another discussion entirely, and I've said enough about dictionaries for now.

A bit of simple googling leads me to at least one other website that has addressed the same question. There we read that aegilops -- my Scrabble instinct says "spoilage!" -- is "(1) an ulcer of the eye; (2) a kind of grass". I'm not sure what those might have to do with one another, unless the grass is medical marijuana.

The same site defines a couple more of Steve's suggestions, but not all of them. It also adds two more, but tsoneca, which the site leaves undefined, is surely a proper name. It's a language group for some indigenous people in the southern part of South America.

9:51:58 PM  [permalink]  comment []