Understanding the OSPD

[tahnan]

My brother has introduced me to the Internet Scrabble Club, where I've played a few games with moderate success. (A few rewarding bingoes, like opening with POINTED, or hooking the D in GROINED onto LAZE. Or the game against my brother where I managed RESTORE, with the first two letters played under PA and FAT, and then later, given an M on a triple word score from a previous turn, played MISFILED onto the adjoining triple word.)

But I'm hoping someone on my friends list is a serious enough Scrabble player to explain something to me about the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.

Why the heck does it contain RETIGHTEN but not *RELOOSEN, the latter of which I had challenged off the board?

Comments

[ztbb.livejournal.com]

OTCWL contains two- to eight-letter words (plus inflected forms) culled from various sources: words needed to be in two of five popular American dictionaries to be included. For words of nine letters or longer, the sole reference is Merriam-Webster's (MW9, I believe). So RELOOSEN must be excluded by the rules which govern OSPD/OTCWL, whereas RETIGHTEN is in because it's MW.

My favorite consequence of this is that FIRSTLY, SECONDLY, THIRDLY, FOURTHLY, FIFTHLY, SIXTHLY, EIGHTHLY, NINTHLY, and TENTHLY are all good, but *SEVENTHLY is phony.

[ztbb.livejournal.com]

Hm, as dougo hints, my explanation above is technically correct but not accurate: RELOOSEN isn't MW, either! (In fact, it's not even in allwords.) So this isn't a Scrabble issue.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Bah, I tell you, bah!