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.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, Google has 19k hits for RETIGHTEN, but only 65 for RELOOSEN. Probably because you generally want to make something tight again after it's become loose, but rarely need to do the opposite.

The word I most wish were Scrabble-legal is DETUNE/DETUNED (20k/40k Google hits, respectively). I see it all the time in record reviews and such. At least SKA finally made it into OSPD3.

[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!

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Short answer: The OSPD is an idiosyncratic hodgepodge, and bears only a haphazard relation to any actual dictionary of English. :-P

There's some documentation of this in Word Freak (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0142002267/104-3273005-8597529?v=glance), which you might enjoy (and are welcome to borrow if so).

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I've read it, in fact, but a year or two ago; I couldn't recall what exactly he said about the OSPD.

I know, of course, that there are bound to be annoying gaps in there (why the heck does ROTINI continue to be left out of dictionaries?), but my current concern is trying to figure out which prefixes I can get away with, and which I can't. Or, perhaps: why the heck is PRETRAIN in there but not *RELOOSEN? And the answer, I suppose, is ultimately that I'm going to be left guessing and hoping. Grr.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

This is why the tournament players described in the book spend all their time memorizing which "words" are legal.

It is also why I refuse to play by any reference other than my house Webster's Unabridged. :-)

It's why I don't play Scrabble.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

Because there are no rules for what constitutes a "word", only a huge arbitrary list. The last time I ever played, or will ever play, Scrabble, my opponent had just played a combination including "OD", which I unsuccessfully challenged, and I responded with "SIDHE", which was challenged successfully. I nearly threw the board (and I am usually a good sport in games).

[spenceraloysius.livejournal.com]

Hey, will you play e-scrabble with me?

See http://www.e-scrabble.com/