'Scrabble – an easy way to win' blog discussion

cliffwalker_3

I thought that when there was a question of whether or not a valid word was being used one of the other players had to challenge it. Reference would then be made to the players' dictionary of choice - usually the one in the house. If the word was there it was accepted and the score given. In some groups the challenger was penalised if the word was in the dictionary, in others not.

Airwolf1

Some use the Official Scrabble Words books!!

Ampersand, I've pm'd you.

G6JPG

I thought for Scrabble, the "official" dictionary was Chambers.

I always thought serious players - who have memorised all the permissible two-letter words - must lose some of the fun, though I appreciate it's probably hard not to do this if you're serious about it. (I think at one time our family played the variant that you had to know what a word meant/s, not just that it exists/ed.)

My brother is associate editor for the OED (which records more or less everything that has ever been used if it got some currency [and still has a lot of single-occurrence mostly misprints from the likes of Shakespeare and especially Spenser]), and as for "After all, if it appears in a National Newspaper it can’t be disputed can it…" - well, I don't know for Scrabble; for the OED their rule of thumb used to be that if it appeared in print, on two different occasions by two different authors (I can't remember if it had to be two different publications), then it went in; the rule being to prevent people deliberately ...

That was when he joined about three decades ago, before electronic media had taken off as much as it has now, so things have changed somewhat; also, the exact rules for "admission" aren't actually published, much like the rules that govern a website's rankings on Google, and for much the same sort of reason.