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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Mildly Interesting
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So the article explains that official tournaments use a unique words list that contains a lot of generous words like "zzz" and "aa". Mostly intended to allow high scoring words for people who studied their list.
The company that maintains the list has added a lot more of these "not a real word but it scores high so we added it" words.
For some highlight words from the article: MIREPOIXS, HORSEFEATHERSES, SUBSPECIESES, GRATINEEED
Players are complaining that high level tournaments are basically going to be competitions for who knows the most gibberish from the tournament word list and it is alienating the general population from joining tournaments and scrabble clubs.
Did smeagol write this list?
Truly, a win for mutant hobbits everywhere.
Shouldn't the official word list just be the dictionary? Isn't that the point?
Something about it just seems to miss the point of the game. You would think their dictionary would be cut down to include commonly known words mixed in with some eccentric ones. If anything, to prevent a situation like this where tournament players are just memorizing gobbledygook for points. Seems like it muttles the fun.
The only good way to play scrabble is by adding the rule that you must play the funniest word you can make.
I have had the most fun when i used to play with categories for double points. Having to explain why such and such belongs is half the fun.
I saw a YouTube video once where they could only use dirty/rude words. https://youtu.be/_PRlIZCI6uE?si=2ZnK2wfc7Vzz4rHb
Makes the game painfully difficult and required lots of passing. Still more exciting than legit scrabble, though. I hate the game and even more so because I was forced to play it by family (for whom scrabble is apparently the most fun board game they know) far more times than I'd like.
Ah, see, my family, now...
They'd refuse to let you play a word, on the grounds that you could surely get a better one, here give me your letters a minute.
Or they wouldn't let you play a word because it didn't 'open up the board', whatever the fuck that means.
I rapidly learned to not play with them.
You can't have an arbitrary list of words that count, precisely because most people won't memorise the dictionary. They'll just play words they know exist. And if a dispute arises they'll likely consult a proper dictionary because who has the Scrabble dictionary to hand?
Its primary purpose is to list all the permissible two letter words because that's where the desperation and disputes arise.
Can't most of the squabbles be squashed in the modern era with a smartphone? Before, your aunt would always play JO insisting it was a word, but you know thats bs. So you search it and find Jo is actually a word used in Scotland. On a second note, I am futher into a discussion about scrabble than I ever thought would be interesting lol
Which dictionary? Merriam Webster added almost 700 "words" this year, including shit like: TTYL, finsta, bussin, cromulent, doggo, simp, goated, and more. I feel like they are slowly becoming urbandictionary.com.
I mean, their job is to provide definitions for the words people use in language, not to gatekeep what words are "good enough" to be defined.
I hear each of the words you've listed all the time, they're part of our language whether we like it or not.
My point was more about which dictionary do you use and less about the exact words added. Webster added them, but Oxford and American Heritage didn't.
Use all of em and if it appears in any it's a word
Now I want to play a game of scrabble where you play a complete nonsense word, and your points are the number of Google results for that word - lowest points wins. And maybe you have 5 letters instead of 7.
I would rather be able to spell out bussin' for points than zzzz, aaa, or Mieropoix. At least it is a word people actually use in conversation.
Mirepoix is an ordinary word in cooking, but it’s an uncountable noun and they’re inventing a fake plural, like “featherses”.
Didnt it specifically say horsefeatherses in one of those comments? I start drawing the line there.
I have never heard or seen mieropoix before.
Cromulent is a perfectly cromulent word.
Modern dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. They don't tell you how things should be spelled, or what meaning they should have. Instead, they report how things are spelled and what people think they mean in the real world.
I knew Meriiam Webster was going to shit when they added "literally" as "figuratively" because people use it facetiously.
That's the point of it, though. People use "literally" as "figuratively, and it should be recorded as such. It doesn't matter that it's facetious or ironic, it's still used that way commonly.
I'm pretty sure the tournaments are just memorising lists. A man won the French competition without being able to speak French... He just memorised the accepted words.
Words in scrabble should be things that people actually use outside scrabble. It's fair if that makes some leeway for slang. It's also fair if it means that some really obscure words that nobody really uses get in. But, this seems over the line because they're taking words that nobody uses, and tacking on un-grammatical endings.
I’m amazed that they allow Zzz. It’s not really a word.
I mean, compared to some of those other ones it's perfectly cromulent. At least it means something.
It truly embiggens the spirit of the game.
Is "bam" a word? It seems like a word, but it's an onomatopoeia, just like zzz. Neither are very accurate to the sounds they make, and neither are truly words... I'd let someone play bam without thinking about it, so I could be convinced to allow zzz
Zzz has no vowels.
🧐
https://youtu.be/4uM17lVwS1c?si=NaMMHlSIMq0dmb32
My horsie has featherses, silly hobbitses
The 10x number of new words added compared to previous editions, and the nonsensical nature of so many of the new entries, says it has to be AI. There's no way some of those would make it past a human editor (except one lazily accepting everything the AI suggests as truth).