OT: Dixonary words and Scrabble words

[Paul Keating]

Recently Dan Widdis posted a picture of a Scrabble board in a family game over the holidays, and remarked that there was no place on the board to play the word GAMEGALL. I said that the word wasn’t valid in Scrabble anyway, and his response was to remind me that the vast majority of Scrabble games are informal and played without an official list of acceptable words, its place (in my youthful experience) being taken by a generally none too well-informed, but indulgent, committee of the older players. Even in tournaments, the rule is, thou shalt not get found out.

That got me wondering what proportion of the words we play are to be found in the official Scrabble lexicons (of which there are two, one for tournament play in North America and another one for the rest of the world). You may remember that the late Dave Cunningham asked a parallel question about Wordle last year. Taking the used-word list as a proxy for the words we play, the answer to his question was: only one word. And even that one didn’t really count. You can read why in this group post. 

But for Scrabble, the short answer, a little to my surprise, was over 50%. 

The figure of 50%+ may need a bit of qualification. 

• For this exercise, as a reference lexicon I used the WESPA tournament list, which is Collins Scrabble Words 2024. It contains 280,887 words. By design, and careful cooperation, it is a superset of its North American counterpart, the NASPA word list 2023, which contains 196,601 words.
• The Scrabble lexicon contains many inflected forms (plurals of nouns, conjugations and participles of verbs, comparatives and superlatives of adjectives, etc) that you will not find as catchwords in a dictionary: they are normally nouns in the singular, verbs in the infinitive, and so on: the exceptions are when the inflected form has a sense not derivable from the uninflected one (consider the 7 senses of the noun living).
• Scrabble does not admit hyphenated words, nor dictionary catchwords that consist of more than one actual word. I have left them out of account (5% of the total) because one can tell without looking that there will be no match. Like inflected forms, but in the other direction.
• I have not considered words that were withdrawn, because that is usually because they turned out to be better-known than the dealer originally thought, and it’s a bit pointless to ask if such well-known words appear in the lexicon: nearly 85% of them do. Of course, not all words were withdrawn because they were too well-known. Some were withdrawn because a round was abandoned, or because of public DQ gaffes, and though there were too many of those, not nearly enough to make a difference to the numbers.
• These numbers lack historical perspective. In the 36 years we have been playing Dixonary, Collins Scrabble Words and its predecessors have gone through about a dozen editions. So it might be that a word was played in the early years of the game, that at the time is was not in the official lexicon of the day. But it was added later, and so counts here as a match. That is admittedly anachronistic, but I’m afraid it is a won’t-fix bug. 

And a Happy New Year to everyone.

And because this is a public forum, and Scrabble is a jealously guarded trademark: Scrabble® (in full, The Scrabble® Brand Crossword Game) is a registered trademark owned in the USA by Hasbro Inc., Pawtucket, Rhode Island 02862-1059, USA; in Canada by Hasbro Canada Corporation, Longueuil, QC, J4G 1G2, Canada; and throughout the rest of the world by J W Spear & Sons, a Mattel Company, Maidenhead, SL6 4UB, England.

--

Paul Keating

Soustons, Nouvelle Aquitaine, France