Why Is The Scrabble Dictionary SO WEIRD?
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- Опубліковано 9 вер 2023
- I've been so grateful for the positive feedback about my recent videos, but there is one piece of feedback that I'm getting over and over again - surprise/disbelief/annoyance about the dictionary we use in competitive play. For that reason, I thought it would be helpful to make a video explaining how the Scrabble dictionary came to be the way it is. If you're one of those commenters, maybe this video won't placate you, but at least you'll have a better understanding of Scrabble's crazy dictionary!
For more Scrabble content from me, follow my Twitch channel:
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I also have a weekly show on the official Scrabble Twitch channel (Tuesdays 3-5 PM ET)
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Play Scrabble at playscrabble.com! - Ігри
Im surprised scrabble players havent conspired to spread words a Q in them. If every scrabble player starts greeting people with Qello, instead of hello, it might take off and there will be another valid Q word.
Qello
you could even shorten it to qi!
Maybe QT as in "cutie" needs to get in!
@@wanderer15 If Za is legal, QT should be legal.
Someday, we will make Quone a real word
I love the two comments from people questioning the validity of 'Or' and 'We'
Oh my god, I thought "ab" was the biggest whopper. I missed those on first watch, that's amazing.
Also some onomatopia like eh
@@rennoc6478i can see "eh" being debatable because its not exactly a word with a set definition, rather just a noise that we make. "or" and "we" are literally words with definitions in the English language that are also extremely common in everyday talk, so people saying it's not a word is hilarious
@@agitated_cat eh, used to represent a sound made in speech in a variety of situations, in particular to ask for something to be repeated or explained or to elicit agreement. That being put aside I do see your point
@@agitated_cateh does have a set definition. Onomatopoeia is different in different languages
When I get frustrated over these things, it's less "This word is made up" and more "This archaic dialectal word is valid but common modern ones aren't." Seriously, why can't I play SHART yet smh
You'd probably only be able to play that word in a tournament. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary that you can buy in stores omits words they have deemed offensive, i.e. racist, scatalogical, etc. Most online/app versions of Scrabble will be in line with that. However in tournament play, anything goes.
@@pjet8042Not that this would likely happen because of the distribution of tiles and optimal play, but could you imagine if someone won a tournament by playing the N word as their final move?
@@MewtwoStruckBack - hopefully they'd be able to play GINGER instead...
@@pjet8042 But what would be the fun in that? It’d be for the shock value
@@pjet8042 Although unlikely There are certain layouts that allow one rather than the other. I'll provide a hypothetical clean board example only relying on one word.
Nig, and Gin.
Nig meaning to dress (stone) with a sharp-pointed hammer
and gin being alcohol.
So, it is possible for someone to be forced to play an offensive word, because of the current state of the board. TBF, I'd probably just take the L on that one.
I could literally watch an entire video, no matter the length, where you just go over every 2 non standard 2 letter word and their definitions. I find them extremely fascinating. Or should I say chould watch a video.
Oh my god, I could make it an all-day event if I needed to
in north american scrabble:
aa: a type of lava distinguished as being very rough and uneven
ab: short for the abdominal muscle
ad: short for advertisement
ae: archaic version of a/an
ag: short for agriculture
ah: a sigh or exclamation
ai: a three-toed sloth
al: a tree in east india
am: first person singular of "to be"
an: one of something
ar: the letter R
as: to compare something
at: to be somewhere
aw: disappointment
ax: an axe
ay: archaic form of "aye"
ba: the soul in egyptian mythology
be: to, well, be
bi: short for bisexual
bo: a pal
by: to be responsible for/the cause of something
da: short for dad
de: of/from (in a name) such as Charles de Gaulle
do: to make something happen
ed: short for education
ef: the letter F
eh: an exclamation
el: short for an elevated train
em: the letter M
en: the letter N
er: an exclamation of hesitation or confusion
es: the letter S
et: archaic past tense of eat
ew: exclamation of disgust
ex: to cross out/a previous relationship
fa: the fourth note of a music scale
fe: a hebrew letter
gi: a suit worn for martial arts
go: to move somewhere or start doing something/a board game
ha: an exclamation of surprise or triumph/laughter
he: referring to a male
hi: greeting
ho: an exclamation of surprise
id: the instinctual, impulsive part of your psyche
if: a conditional/possibility
in: to be within something
is: singular third person of (to be)
it: referring to an inanimate object
jo: a sweetheart
ka: the spiritual self of a human in egyptian mythology
ki: alternate spelling of qi
la: to sing/the sixth note on a musical scale
li: a chinese unit of distance
lo: an exclamation of surprise or to attract attention
ma: short for mother
me: first person singular
mi: third note on a musical scale
mm: an exclamation of acknowledgement or satisfaction
mo: short for a moment
mu: a letter of the greek alphabet
my: posessive singular
na: slang for no
ne: name born with
no: negative
nu: a letter of the greek alphabet
od: a hypothetical force of natural power
oe: a whirlwind from the faroe islands
of: coming from
oh: an exclamation of surprise
oi: an exclamation for attention
ok: confirmation
om: a mantra
on: above
op: abstract art
or: otherwise
os: a bone
ow: an exclamation of pain
ox: an animal
oy: an exclamation
pa: father
pe: a letter of the hebrew alphabet
pi: a letter of the greek alphabet
po: a chamber pot
qi: vital force of life in chinese mythology
re: second tone of a musical scale
sh: used to urge silence
si: alternative seventh tone on a musical scale
so: a conjunction; therefore
ta: an expression of gratitude
te: i have no idea but it's in the dictionary
ti: seventh tone on a musical scale
to: in the direction of
uh: expression of hesitation
um: expression of hesitation
un: archaic form of "an" or "one"
up: above/to raise
us: we
ut: also no idea why but this is valid too
we: us
wo: woe
xi: a letter of the greek alphabet
xu: a monetary unit in vietnam
ya: short for yeah/an asian pear
ye: archaic form of you
yo: an exclamation to call attention to
za: pizza
Yours is a truly ginormous idea!
"te" and "ut" are more obscure ones in the do-re-mi set, "te" being the flat seventh and "ut" being another "do" (it was originally ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la but there were obvious problems with one of them having a consonant at the back)
also you forgot "hm"
hey man, "or" isn't a word
Honestly the thing I'm most amazed about is that the Oxford English Dictionary isn't used in either scrabble dictionary
The official scrabble dictionary: 100,000 words.
North American tournament Word list: 190,000 words.
Collins Scrabble words: 280,000 words.
Oxford English Dictionary: 1,000,000 words, at least 600,000 of which would make it into scrabble without question.
It would be a radically different game!
@@nagcopaleen9078 How is it that the North American tournament word list has more words than the official Scrabble dictionary?
It’s because the Americans wouldn’t be able to misspell “colour” anymore.
@@aspuzlingthe official list only includes entries with base words up to 8 letters. Whereas, the tournament list includes words up to 15 letters. Also, a few trademarks in wide use (like jello) and curse words are added to the tournament dictionary.
I think many people grossly underestimate how many words they don't know. The two-letter ones just stand out because of their amazing utility in scrabble. There is a huge number of bizarre words but because there are so many more permutations of longer words you're way less likely to see any particular one, and again, the two-letter ones are unique in their versatility, causing them to pop up even more frequently. I imagine many people who value playing "beautiful", long words see the strange two-letter ones kind of like abusing a game mechanic. Unfortunately for them, pros play to win.
Excellent points!
"za" seems to be more of a slang version of pizza. It really depends on what you call a word, but I would argue if "za" counts as word, so should for example "gud" (short for "good" as in "git gud"), "ez" ( short for "easy" as in "2ez" or "ez pz") or even just "lol".
@@bultvidxxxix9973 If your examples would show up in a dictionary, than they probably would be added to scrabble in the future and perfectly legal to play
Scrabble should make all words less than 8 letters illegal to play.
@@reginaldforthright805 ikr that would make the game so much better! Nobody would even be able to start a Scrabble game, which imo is better for the whole world
Pah, modern scrabble is all about memorization!! The creativity of old-school scrabble is lost! I propose the variant Scrabble 96,000, alternatively called Richards Random. For each game, the dictionary is formed by generating random strings whose lengths and letter distributions match the original scrabble dictionary. Players get 30 minutes to study it before the game starts. Who's with me??
Holy hell
lol wtf
You're a chess player, aren't you ? :P
Fpar telpua seln, otnf hc ms.
(That sounds good, count me up.)
Made a generator for it, maybe I could try to get relations between letters in scrabble dictionary to make it sound more English while keeping it random, but as pure Fisher Scrabble this works.
(Yitd o voiuiueae reg ew, tnnfi L enydt eia rs ade aeeieeige riuuawi ptmsair ew vnsgsism nmiecyadoe ko aiau ew eaaia csst Cwyasau accev daleici ew sfalcn, bri dr rkss Oceltu Oshasteo woun yesll.)
@@louisraphael1727 New comment just dropped
As someone who has read thousands of chapters of english translated chinese books qi is 100% a word at very common in these books you can even see it in book titles and simular ie "3000 years of qi refinement" (which somehow has a netflix show apparently). I assume the other "fake" words in the dictionary are also commonly used by some people, or once were in relatively common use by some people - otherwise why would they be in the dictionary!
Right, a word is a word because people needed a way to describe something. A word is only strange because a person doesn't know it yet.
"Ch" has never even been _a_ word, let alone a _common_ word. It's a dead prefix.
@@IsomerMashups
Pronoun
ch
(obsolete, dialectal) Alternative form of I
The word "I" is quite common.
It was short for ich the form of I used in the West Country, West Midlands, and Kent in England some time ago.
Hope this helps.
@@y124music
It is and has only ever been used _exclusively_ alongside other words.
And, even were that _not_ the case, _it's still been out of use for centuries._
If you're willing to go back far enough and dissect prefixes enough, _every_ two-letter combination is a "word."
@@IsomerMashups so "an" isn't a word because it only comes before vowels? Also the reason it can be counted but something like "éǵh₂" obviously can't is because it was used in english that is still understandable to most speakers (at least I think that's the reason I'm not Collins Dictionary).
Hi, i'm faroese and I think that I can explain that mystical word "oe". The etymology isn't exactly correct, the correct form would be "oethi" or "øði" in faroese. The word "øði" just means wrath. However we do have a faroese word for that phenomena called "niðanfok"(en. uppwards drift) or "fúka upp"(en. to drift up). I'm guessing that the word "oe" comes from the first faroese dictionary by Svabo in the early 1800's.
excellent thankyou!
Amazing information, thank you
Looks like the dictionary commitee fúka upp that one
It feels like "oe" should just be the English name for the letter ø (very uniformed opinion).
@@eliasmochan correct, that is how the nordic languages typically "anglify" the letters ø and ö.
imagine learning a new word and being mad about it for some reason.
@@jiaan100 Buzz off using "autistic" as some kind of insult. Also it's not because a word is odd or foreign to you that it's not reasonable to use it. The point of scrabble is to reward a wide knowledge of words
@@jiaan100 Not words because.. you personally don't know anyone who uses them?
@@jamessudlow lol
@@jiaan100you make a valid point, but how do you draw the line as to what constitutes “enough” usage? It could be pretty subjective.
As Will said in the video, the rules of the game state that a word is valid if it appears in a mainstream dictionary, so that’s the standard which is used.
@@jiaan100 As an autistic person you definitely are using it as such lol.
What’s hard for me is stuff like at a local zoo there’s a tur and a degu. Both are live animals but not valid in NWL. OTOH, coins that haven’t existed for a thousand years are still valid. Weird.
I was wearing a GI in karate class back in the 70's, but it was only recently added to the Official Word List. The Chinese musical instrument PIPA is in the OWL, but not other common Chinese instruments ERHU*, GUQIN* and GUZHENG*.
I love the Collins approach. I think it’s cool to see weird and archaic words and learning their meaning and history. And you can really put an opponent off with a wacky play too.
I'm more of a TWL player and Collins observer. I don't have the time or the energy to memorize that much shit, but I find high-level Collins matches to be the most fun to watch as a spectator.
The extra words add extra nuances and decisionmaking to the game (see the other video on this channel about Nigel deciding whether to challenge a play off the board because he knew which of the 9,751 different suffixed variations of SULFUR was bad in Collins).
Coming from the world of speedrunning, all of these complaints remind me *so* much of complaints about "glitches" in speedruns. Anyone who has ever actually been active in a speedrunning community knows that it is impossible to come up with a consistent definition for what does and does not count as a "glitch". The only reasonable compromise is to say, "If it can be done by anybody with a copy of the game, it is fair game." As a result, speedrunners don't really see glitches as a form of cheating, or even as anything unusual; we just see them as additional tools to move around the game we're playing.
Unrelated, one of the versions of Scrabble I play the most is on the PlayStation. I've always really liked the cover art for the PAL PS1 version of Scrabble, but I only just learned from this video that it was just using the cover of the Collins dictionary at the time! I love that image! (the one of the tiles fighting over the triple word score)
Amazing comparison that I had not considered before!
The distinction is this:
Speedrunners don't pull out absurd glitches when they play a casual multiplayer game with their friends. They generally have the social awareness to understand that there's a distinction between the spirit and the law of the game. _Scrabblers don't._
_That's_ where the terrible reputation originates.
I go to a weekly board game night. Every time I've seen someone passionately interested in Scrabble, they rules lawyer to hell and back and drop words like "oe" and "ch." _Nobody_ enjoys it. Fortunately, they _do_ seem to have the social awareness to realize they're unwelcome and never come back. I suppose the glares, eyerolls, and whispering makes it slightly clearer.
@@IsomerMashups What are you talking about?
@@XANDOAndy
I'm sorry for your lack of reading comprehension.
@@IsomerMashupsI mean, speedrunners absolutely will pull out glitches and similar in play against similarly skilled players.
If you want someone to go easy on you, you can always ask them. Or make a rule that means the person playing the word also needs to roughly know the definition of it really is getting out of hand.
When I play with my friends, our agreement is that if you can define the word and use it in a sentence before looking it up, you get to keep it. It’s our happy middle ground because it allows people to play those weird 2 letter words have it feel like an actual word as opposed to “I just memorized it on the list” which I feel takes the spirit out of the game.
TLDR: If you play “Za” and tell me that its another name for pizza, I’ll accept it better than if you say that its ok because its on a list
I was playing with my friend and he made the word "cornflaked". Even though it caused him to win, I knew I could never challenge such a glorious word
I don't play Scrabble but these are the rules that my friends and I play Bananagrams with.
I just don't like za as a word lol
Great video, thanks!
I think the issue is that so many of these words are so obscure that even a well-read person would never encounter them in the wild. A bit like all those ridiculous collective nouns that are never ever used in real life except to tell people that a group of rhinoceros is called a "crash". Some person just invented them for funsies a few hundred years ago and now the myth perpetuates that these are the collective nouns for things when there is no usage to back it up. It is the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate.
This turns Scrabble from a game of strategy building on knowledge you already have into rote memorisation of the equivalent of a foreign dictionary, like that guy who won the French Scrabble tournament without speaking French. Impressive stuff, but makes the game inaccessible to normal people.
That’s true - well put. But there’s also a burden on the competitive world to show that not all levels of competition are like this (absurd dedication to memorization/min-maxing everything). Strong home players can walk into a tournament and find lots of people at their level to play. I admit I don’t do a great job of this myself, focusing as I do on the super-elite level of play.
'That guy'
the weird 2 letter words having legitimate usage is great, but even if hypothetically they were all nonsense, i think they still contribute positively to the game.
also, house rules exist for a reason. if people are against all the weird words, they can just... agree to play without them. i like the rule where a word has to be in the dictionary and ALSO you need to be able to define it from memory.
This is exactly where I disagree. Respectfully, of course.
I think they make the game worse. In my opinion, they completely change the way you play the game. Thus, dividing the player base into players who have memorised these specific two-letter words, and those who have have not. I would consider that a massive negative.
House rules are fine, I use them personally. But that should not stop me from arguing in favour of changing the official rules too. Why should people who think like me not have a chance to play in tournaments? Maybe my version of scrabble should be the official one, and your version can be relegated to house rules.
@@purpleness4422I think the two letter words just allows for more plays in general. At least personally I find that often I want to play a word that would otherwise get blocked by a 2 letter word I would otherwise think is invalid, but under Scrabble dictionary is probably perfectly fine. And the end game especially where you're scrambling to use up all your remaining letters is a perfect opportunity to squeeze in those last few points. More words=more fun imo. Besides, they're just 2 letter words they're not hard to memorize at all.
@@purpleness4422Is the game not divided into those categories as it stands now?
I feel like the people who have memorized those 2 letter words have a distinct advantage in eitger scenario.
There are no weird words. There are only words you don't know yet.
Whether the weird two letter words improve or detract from the game, I think it’s clear that removing them now would have a major impact on the character and strategy of the game.
I remember early on in my Scrabble career when I'd get so mad while studying words in CSW and discovering a ton of words that just didn't make any sense to me. But after a few years now, they are barely words to me anymore, i store them like code and don't bother making too much sense of it. Great video by the way Will! Love how you're making lemonades off your experiences and criticism. Much love from Nigeria 💚
"they are barely words, I store them as code"
that's exactly why people are complaining - scrabble became "use random sequences of letters soneone wrote down" instead of "show off how diverse your vocabulary is"
That's _exactly_ why people complain about it. It's not even a word game at that point.
Your channel is way too good. Even with negative response you can still make a good and educational video out of it! Kudos to you.
Scrabble is so much more complex than what I thought it was when I played it as a little kid. It's great to be able to learn more stuff from this channel. Keep up the great work!
Every scrabble checker I've used has given the definition of "ch" as an abbreviation for "church", which I always thought was strange as abbreviations aren't normally allowed. Interesting to learn it's original origin.
Credits to the ancient Chinese people who inadvertently coined QI for me to play the Q without U easily
Give credit too to Arabians and Africans for QAT (also know as KAT and KHAT).
middle easterners carrying most of the “Q without U” word category:
Would love to see a similar explanatory style video about interesting banned/removed words from the game!
that ruined a great bingo for me one time
This is a great way to get your channel demonitized
This would be a super interesting topic, but also has the potential to get pretty heated. I've been considering how to approach it!
I think 'Jew' was removed from Collins. Do you know why?@@wanderer15
@@henrgI once had the n-word as the only valid bingo play, but thankfully that tournament was still using CSW19
Some "weird" words like qi is probably pretty common now due to fiction and games.
It would be interesting to see a dictionary with only commonly used words being used for scrabble. Like a special tourney or something.
the secret of scrabble is that you are not forced to make a real word, in fact you are allowed to make up any word you want, you just have to convince the opponent that the word you want to use is a real word used in the world, and the moment he approves and your word is placed, it's there for the game
yes, doing it is impolite 🗿
It's not really "impolite", challenging is part of the box rules of Scrabble and you can easily prevent your opponent by doing it by improving your word knowledge so you can spot fake words (which are called phonies in competitive scrabble) and challenge them off more easily
This is a legitimate strategy used by tournament players, some of the (fake) words I recall having been played successfully by top tournament players in a desperate attempt to get back into the game are TETIART, REDISCERN, and OVERTALL. Of course, you could call this "cheating", but it's part of the box rules, and like I said you can easily prevent this from happening to you if you get better at recognizing phonies, and each of these cases the opponent made a mistake by not recognizing that those words aren't real and not challenging them.
Also in my opinion, phonying being a valid strategy adds another dimension of bluffing to the game and makes for some of the most hilarious stories. Top Scrabble player Josh Sokol got away with BOBETAH in a game and defined it as a cross between a bobcat and cheetah.
This is how the band Foghat was formed
I come back to this one every so often. As someone who often says "I'm jonesing for some za, I'm so glad it was added. On that note, I'm glad "jonesing" is also valid.
I love that the explanation for ch is that it's part of a word, coming from a german word
it’s not from a german word, it’s just that english used to have nearly the same word for ‘I’ as german, ‘ich.’ this is from proto-west germanic *ik, which fricated in german to ‘ich’ (fricative at the end) and affricated in english to ‘ich,’ pronounced historically as ‘each.’ the words were pronounced differently in english and german, it’s just that ‘ch’ represents a fricative in german and mostly an affricate in english
ah i was confused as he said the first person pronoun@@senecavermeulen8110
I think scrabble is more fun when the words are well known by everyone playing. In tournaments that means all the words and Will telling us the definitions when the rarer words are played is a great way to increase vocabulary even if the chance to use the words is unlikely to come.
love the comment that said "we" wasnt a word. Wonder how he thinks "we" all feel about that...
My only gripe with 2-letters words is the very fact that there are so many different lists of them - I play Words With Friends which has a totally non-standard dictionary from either SOWPODS or TWL, so the occasion I play OTB scrabble with friends my 2-letter intuition goes out the window.
I started playing word games on the internet in English ever since I had internet when I was in my teens. English is not my native language, but most people learn English here.
The first game I played was just a basic 16 letter anagram game and you would get the full word list at the end. I'd always read the list after each game and thus expand my vocabulary for the game and get better at the game. I'd never bothered looking up the meaning of those words as I figured I didn't need to know that and I would learn the meaning when that became relevant to speaking English. This wasn't to expand my English vocabulary, it was just to get better at playing this one game.
When I started playing Scrabble in English online later on I used this knowledge to play obscure words I'd learned from that game and people would ask me what they meant. I regularly had to say "I don't know. I just know it's a valid word." And it would often piss people off that a non-native English speaker was beating them using words they didn't know the meaning of but were valid words.
I do think that, just as a sound will become a word if enough people recognize it as having a common meaning, a sound should stop being a word if that recognition falls below a certain threshold. I understand that the scrabble dictionary is only borrowing from other lexicographical works, but I still think a middle ground should be taken where if a word is clearly no longer in use in a given language, it shouldn't be allowed for use in a game centered around spelling words of that language. Still, this is no gripe at all about your channel - I love your videos!
The idea of cleaning up the dictionary of obsolete words absolutely seems like a good one on its face. The problem is that as competitive players, we're all very fond of our obscure, barely-acceptable words which we often can't even define (lol), and would hate to see them go!
@@wanderer15From a practical perspective, I can't imagine it would go smoothly. Adding new words is one thing - if players fail to memorize them, then they won't know all their options, and *might* issue a spurious challenge or two. If words are removed, but a player doesn't remember that it was? Dear lord the *salt* that would ensue.
This little video just makes me smile. Love the history on OE. And the intro is hysterical. Thanks for all you do for Scrabble!
As usual, I have no idea why UA-cam recommended this, and as usual, I learned a bunch of new things about a fascinating subject I've been sort of wondering about for a long time.
Thanks for the video, that was a very satisfying watch!
Why do these people think "ab" and "aw" aren't words?
And "Eh" as well! I use that word every day!
Unrelated question, guess which country I'm from!
I've seen many people say that onomatopoeia shouldn't really be words
and "we" and "or"!! (1:00)
@@Charles-yi3mx That seems silly to me. Where do you draw the line? Should words like honk or bang be invalid?
@@Muskoxing why should'nt they ? both are frequently used verbs...
I'm convinced by all of them except "ch". The definition clearly says that it is always fused with other letters and does not appear by itself. There is no world in which parts of words can be considered words, or else you could play any common substring ("ght" for example). It's not a word if it doesn't appear by itself. The correct term for something like that is "morpheme".
some of the complaints are understandable (za seems like a weird include, especially since its a localized shortening of pizza - since grats, crip, guac, preg aren't legal despite being pretty common modern shortenings of words), but complaining about qi just sounds ignorant, though i guess the comment about shortening is moreso a question of the dictionaries catching up with modern language
GUAC at least is coming in the 7th edition update!
Just looked it up on Wiktionary; “ch” is a dialectal weak form of “ich”, which is an archaic form of “I”. Dutch has a similar weak form in colloquial use: ik → ’k.
“Drop a comment below and I’ll add it to the pile” lmao most savage interaction reminder ever
Question: If a new rule to competitive Scrabble was announced that forced players to define any word they played (not necessarily recite the official definition, just make it clear that they know what the word means) do you think that would actually limit the words that get played, or would that be just as easy for pros to memorize as the words themselves?
Interesting suggestion! I do think the top players would make that extra effort. It surely would not be as easy to memorize - it would introduce another barrier to full in-game mastery of the dictionary, but I don't think it would be an unreachable level of memorization.
This is more or less the house rule I play with (in noncompetitive, i.e. fun, Scrabble)
@@RealGrouchy -yes, when I play against non-tournament players (i.e. living room Scrabble), I only play a word if I can define it.
That's the house rule I use against less experienced players. They can look up words freely, but I'll only play a word if I can give a definition.
The opposite of Nigel Richards and French
My favourite part is that at 0:55 they act as if emeus is a ridiculous word, its the plural of emu, that's like saying ducks isn't a word.
I think a lot of casuals to the world of scrabble bristle at the idea of scrabble being a *strategy* game. Or even of the game being played competitively at all. I think a lot of those people have a memory of a time they busted out their parents dusty scrabble box, and found out that either (a) one of their friends knew some basic defensive scrabble strategy that led to a clustered board and a less fun game for,l them, or (b) they just realized that other people just have a much better command of vocabulary, making them feel dumb.
I don't bristle. I understand strategy is involved. I like competition. I still think that the list of words in the competitive game should match general knowledge or risk becoming an elitist gated experience -- which is what we observe. So be it.
@@qqw743 It doesnt take much to memorize all the 2 letter words.
@@qqw743 There's 107 two-letter words in scrabble. I don't even play the game competitively but that's hardly anything to memorize.
@@qqw743 I really don't disagree with this point of view. It's a shame that so much of the good stuff in Scrabble is in fact gated behind the oddness of the words.
@@qqw743 Yeah but the problem is, how do you define "general knowledge" in an objective way, that still allows millions of people to play by one standard set of words?
No matter how you do it, some of the words are going to be "weird" to somebody. Setting the standard at "this word appears in reputable dictionaries" seems fine. Much better that way, vs. "internet rando thinks this word is dumb, take it out"
I used to play this version of Scrabble (maybe early 2000s), where in it contains the official rule book, that ALSO contains the whole entire list of 2-letter words valid at that time. Me and my friends always refer to this list to check whether our two-letter word plays are valid, and with its help, managed to net some crazy combo plays
People complaining about "made up" words, just wait until they find out how all the other words we use came about.
Fun fact, oe is the English writing of the Scandinavian (letter) ø.
Love the stuff, as a guy who only played the game a handful of times as a kid I never thought I would enjoy scrabble content so much but the algorithms brought me here and I really love the complexity of the top level strategies! I found a similar interest about chess 6 years ago and I see some similarities in the way players compete in both (clock, 1v1, ELO, etc..)
I like how people have a problem with slang terms like Za but are perfectly happy to use ‘sus’ and ‘rofl’
Thanks for not censoring the comments
Wow, what are the chances.
I recently got interested in scrabble and this channel. I did not expect to hear about the Faroe Islands, my home country, in a video about scrabble.
I have personaly never heard about the word "oe" but now i will remember it forever.
I've heard a couple stories of Scrabble experts traveling to the Faroes, asking about oes, and the locals having zero idea what they're talking about
HA! Proof that scrabble nerds just made this shit up! "ZA", yeah right.
@@warrendsmith6832 ua-cam.com/video/qkP2F7kWn7A/v-deo.htmlsi=IG_L4j4dkpool_SD
You mean dictionary makers, not Scrabble nerds. Blame the people who put together the source dictionaries, which had nothing to do with Scrabble. The one and only one example I know of a set of words being added to the Scrabble dictionary without coming from the source (general purpose, not Scrabble) dictionary was the time the Scrabble owners had a little publicity stunt and had people vote on a word to add. GEOCACHE was the word voted in, and was added, along with its related forms like GEOCACHED etc. Other than that, it has always been the case that dictionary makers decide to add a word to their dictionary for dictionary making reasons that have nothing to do with Scrabble. So yeah, Scrabble players did not make up ZA or CH or anything else. They got included because they were in an actual English dictionary. @@warrendsmith6832
How cool! Thank you for stopping by my channel and watch out for those "oes" ;)
How on earth did so many people complain about 'ab'? Onomatopoeia I can see why you'd get confused over, but 'ab' is literally one of the most well-known colloquial muscle names.
There's a comment in the mix complaining about "or" as well. Some people don't think before they speak.
@@Charles-yi3mx I even once had a comment of someone listing "BE" as a word they disliked, but couldn't dig it up when I searched for it (maybe deleted in shame?)
This is literally my reaction when seeing people complaining about QI. Bro QI is more well known than like 80% of all the 2-letter words in Scrabble from both dictionary
They probably think of it, rightly or wrongly, as an abbreviation of "abdominal muscle"
It does not particularly help the case that ch is defined to be "always fused with the verb".
I mean that's gotta be only the fifth best complaint about ch. A shortened, fused version of a German pronoun that fell out of use over 500 years ago? Come on now.
Know what? Screw using a combined word library from different English dictionaries, just add EVERY dictionary into play and watch the chaos unfold!
urban dictionary
Another wonderful video. Personally, I think the "weird" words can be very helpful, and one of the reasons I like seeing your videos covering professional games is all the weird words I see in them! Keep up the great work :)
Highly informative and entertaining. Great stuff, as usual, Will. Although there are plenty of words which aren't featured in CSW yet, lexicographers don't get enough credit.
Lmao 0:59 did Daniel just ask what “or” mean?
I do think there should be a “colloquial words” dictionary where only the top 100k or so words *currently* used (like, either you know them or you could reasonably find them in a book or on the news) are valid. It just makes more sense for most people who think of Scrabble as a language game and not a technical game
It would also create an interesting experience for tournament play. They would have to use a highly decreased dictionary, limiting their options.
@@memyselfishnessMaybe it could be a separately sanctioned Scrabble variant, akin to how FIDE has started sanctioning tournaments for Chess 960/Fischer Random Chess in addition to standard chess. Maybe it could be Scrabble's answer to bullet chess.
A dictionary designed for school kids would probably do the trick here. You could use one in your games at home. I'm sure lots of families already do something similar.
@@procsorted I don't think that's a good approach. Highly technical obscure words that are still used should be allowed, such as chemical names. Archaic foreign versions of spellings of words that aren't used anywhere and slang that is only used when texting friends should not be allowed.
@@denisl2760 Ah so you want the Denis dictionary. Fair enough. Just let the publishers know which words you like 😋
I find it so interesting how detached from language as we usually see it scrabble words get it and how they’re really nothing more than tools for the players. Imagine if the community took a similar approach to say some grassroots esports (super smash bros melee is the main one im thinking of because its the one im most familiar with) and changed the rules (word list) for some kind of betterment of the game cause I feel like there definitely could exist some arbitrary set of letters that would make a more engaging game if they were accepted as valid
I compare Scrabble to Magic a lot - a game with a very very large “move set” (words in Scrabble, cards in Magic) but Magic cards are obviously very purposefully created to perform a certain role, whereas in Scrabble, the development of language is completely random (detached, to use your word).
Hahahaha that beginning was hilarious. Keep up the incredible high-quality content!
I get the logic in allowing any word that is in even one of the source dictionaries, but we probably could have avoided alienating a lot of people if the word list included only the words found in *a majority* of sources, like at least three of the five lexica. That seems like a much more solid basis for a word list that people can get on board with.
I have thought this too. I didn't get into this in the video, but one (and only one) of the OSPD updates did conform to a multi-source standard, whereas the rest became single-source (as I mentioned, the reason is increasingly that there aren't enough places updating regularly for there to even be a multi-source requirement anymore)
Will's videos always give me so much happiness, love scrabble lore videos like this
I don't care at all for scrabble, but I watch all of your videos, because they are simply very entertaining. The stories are great and you are a good storyteller, a very good storyteller.
Thank you for giving my videos a chance!
"But they play stuff like ... (AW)"
aw man, it sure sucks that aw isn't a word. hm, maybe i can write down all these weird words on one ab, then get some za while i study
also people questioning 'za' as a word is vindicating for me hating when people refer to pizza as 'za'
OH MY GOD SOMEONE QUESTIONING "WE" AS A WORD LMFAO
-we- need to ban that person from everything /j
I think scrabble should have more swords and/or pistol duels involved. I figure this has like to do with words, but it’d be fun to watch
The obscure two-letter words are weird, but (as a novice) I've come to accept them as a net good for the game because it makes the gameplay more exciting! Playing parallels is one of my favorite things to do when playing with my brother, as well as dropping the QI/ZA bombs
Qi is tooootally a valid word too, like I don't think it should be a contentious question. It's just ki/chi but romanized different (yall heard of the Qing Dynasty?)
...most of the complaints in the intro are valid gripes except for the people complaining about nu, like lmao broskis have yall ever heard of the Greek alphabet. Of all the 2-letter words in the list, nu has got to be one of the least challenge-able
Qi is clearly a word. Za is slang that should not be a word.
The words BINGOING and BINGOED are actually only in the Scrabble dictionary because of Scrabble. The definition of BINGOED in the Collins dictionary is "BINGO, to play all seven of one's tiles at Scrabble [v]".
NU complaints surprise me too!
@@denisl2760 - ZA bothered me too when it was added to the official dictionary. I wondered if it was a regional thing (like the way a sandwich is either a sub, a hero or a hoagie depending on where you are in the U.S.) but I've yet to hear pizza referred to as za anywhere.
I actually used "Oe" in a poem. It's a zephyr in the South Pacific.
I’ve always wondered that, it’s hilarious how many words are legal.
If I didn’t get in to scrabble I would probably be like the many people asking what the heck these weird words are. But due to me getting into the game I actually now get it. And as of now I’m getting scolded at school and home when I play scrabble because of these weird words.
You'll have to show them this video ;)
The fact that you don't understand _why_ people are upset with you demonstrates precisely the lack of social awareness which is causing them to get upset with you in the first place.
@@IsomerMashups I’m cool with the people who scolded me after I showed them this video. I’m fine now.
I love some of the wacky words in there. Makes it harder to learn, but you learn a lot of stuff.
Like half of those words are obvious though. Can't believe "em" was one of the ones that kept recurring; I actually knew the meaning of that one before this video.
and even if EM and EN weren't typesetting terms, they would still be the names of the letters "M" and "N". Even funnier than people challenging EM and EN is people challenging AB, ET, and QI. Some of the comments shown at the beginning of the video even challenge the validity of OR and WE. I can understand not knowing that FE is the 17th letter of the Hebrew abjad or that DE is the fifth letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, but not knowing AB or QI?
I can't definitively say this is your best video ever, but it is definitely the best video I have watched! I know the editing of the comments and all the graphics probably took a great deal of time (as well as the audio/music) but it paid off in spades! Keep up the fantastic work. You are doing more for scrabble than you probably know!
Thank you so much! It was a little different than the game analysis videos for sure, which revolve a lot around the game board. I'll definitely be experimenting with this format more.
I love all the unusual words in scrabble they’re awesome. Learning is fun, it turns out!
Thanks for making this. As someone who has studied linguistics this is a pretty interesting and informative overview of why the Scrabble dictionaries are as they are. The Chambers dictionary makes a lot of sense.
Sometimes when I play with family we pick a single dictionary like Merriam Collegiate and sometimes even rule out certain classes of words (like foreign currencies, letter names, or slang) to accommodate everyone. Keeps it more accessible for everyone, because honestly it's not as fun when one person knows all these obscure Scrabble words that no one has heard of.
Scrabble is great at all levels as long as there isn't a huge knowledge or skill gap between players - agree that one person going crazy with those weird "Scrabbly" words against others who don't know them isn't conducive to a fun game.
I don't know if it was already the case back in the 70th, but a lot of recent dictionaries would include made-up words so as to use it as evidence in case their work was simply copied/stolen.
Thus, by including all words from multiple dictionary sources, it is very possible that actual made-up words became part of the scrabble dictionary.
I love that you actually interacted with the comments at the start LOL
Given that no-one is forced to play Scrabble, go to Scrabble tournaments, or watch Scrabble-related videos, it really is strange how many people are busy getting mad over not recognising every Scrabble word. If learning new words to play a game doesn't sound like fun to you, have you ever considered just not playing the game? 😂😂😂
Word.
True! But I really do understand why the dictionary frustrates a lot of people. I don't expect this video to change too many minds, but at least it'll explain how things came to be the way they are.
In over 20 years of playing in our local club, there were 2 incidents where someone came up to us in a coffee shop, observed the "weird" words on the board, and became angry and argumentative.
Two thoughts: 1. I've mentioned before that it would be interesting to have tournaments based on a sort of People's Dictionary of words in common parlance. This would eliminate the problem that success in competitive Scrabble is based on list memorization (and strategy of course) rather than on playing a game based on something we all know -- English. The People's Dictionary could be crowdsourced by sifting through the existing word lists, casting aside nonsense like oe that no one uses. The standard would be "Have you said it in the last year?"
2. Would love to see you interview Fatsis, or discuss and update Word Freak. I read it when it came out and am curious what has changed and what has not. Thanks.
What if someone is well educated in a certain topic and regularly uses obscure chemical names for example? They're clearly real words, but would that make it into your "people's dictionary"?
But this does not eliminate memorization at all. You would have to memorize what is on the "normal word" list and what is not.
Also this would feel awful to play casually because a word you use in your day-to-day life might not be in the basic dictionary and you can't really guess.
just find some crazy person to spend 3 years and do it themselves
@@denisl2760 In order to make it into the people's dictionary, it would have to be upvoted by a certain percentage of voters, eliminating obscure expertise problems.
@@brainface2970 It might not eliminate memorization but it would greatly reduce it. If you have "DABINGL" on your rack, you'll find a bingo or not, depending on your strengths as a player of ordinary words. But if I play it, you won't challenge it because you'll go "Oh, yeah, fair, that's a word."
But if I ask someone who is not memorizing the Collins to find a word using "OORIE," they might not find "oorie" unless they're Scottish.
Why the Official Scrabble Dictionary would exclude the OED to their list of go-to dictionaries was not a wise choice. Actually, the Shorter OED would have been the only dictionary they would have needed!
People getting mad at “Qi” clearly don’t watch Avatar.
Avatar ?
@@xl000 Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's a pretty popular show and there's a part in it where the main character has to "channel their qi" or something.
@@santaisreal are you talking about the 2005 Nickelodeon anime ?
@@xl000 idk what year it was or if it was on nickelodeon lol i watched it on like netflix or something
Would love to see your babble royale highlights using these words as much as possible
Removing words whose dictionary definitions start with "old english, archaic, dialect, abbreviation" and so on would already start to clean the list up nicely to make it more 'reasonable', but in the end just seeing it as a list of allowed tools makes more sense than tackling an eternal debate over which words count.
I knew a couple of the two letter words, like za and qi. My mother would flip her shit every time we play, saying they aren't real words. She would concede that I won, but it wasn't with real words. Very annoying and that is just me knowing a couple two letter words
Playing in family situations, you can (and probably should) agree to play with a smaller wordlist, eg. whatever dictionary you have on the shelf.
When I was very small, PH was once a valid word I swear I played this word before. Also EMF was valid too!!!! Now both of these words no longer exist
My dude, you have gotten to the level of Scrabble brain-rot that you are _knowingly antagonizing your own mother._
I've got four letters for you: S-T-O-P.
Okay so after the 40th time of UA-cam recommending me your videos and me watching the whole thing AGAIN I figured I should subscribe. Great stuff!
Thank you very much!
I would be curious to see play with a house rule I have played with, which is that you have to know the meaning of the word. I know players can memorise a lot of words, but adding the definition would make it much harder, and I'd be curious to see what people prioritise in those settings.
May the river of comments be blown back to their source by this oe of truth
The "challenge" of a word should force the opponent to come up with a sentence using that word, or explaining it
Here I was thinking Za was like some old word that became defunct. No, it's actually just about Hot Za
Which is a bit weird. Isn't 'za typically spelled with an apostrophe, which the rules say excludes it?
The intro was fantastic 😂
Unrelated, but hear me out: what about a full-information version of Scrabble? The initial racks are randomized, as is the order of the letters in the bag, but the order at which you get new letters is revealed at the beginning of the game. Still way too complex to do exact calculation until close to the end, but maybe interesting?
These are the turns in competitive games that drain the most time - the endgame (perfect information) and when your opponent plays a phony bingo which you challenge off. Some of those decisions are brutally complicated (and very interesting, as you suggest)
It's just funny that people don't make a fuss about long words they have never seen in their life but when they see a shorter one they don't know the meaning of, somehow that is preposterous. It's all just words.
WHOA at 2:08 it sounds like there is a very slight echo just as you're saying "original" and I immediately started thinking about Chris Staecker
It’s weird that people would be so against obscure short words. Almost never have I seen people upset by obscure long words
"Ch" contains no vowels. It is literally unpronounceable.
Great video.. really explains a lot!
I learned what an oe is today (although it's not in you-tube's spellcheck list). I always thought slang words and abbreviations were not allowed (which would eliminate za on two counts).
I find it strange that they're still sticking to dictionaries that aren't updated anymore, severely limiting the new words that can come in. You'd think that the Collins dictionary would allow words from, well, Collins. Maybe then I could play ACIDISE which would be a great common bingo.
The wordlists are updated every 4 or 5 years. If ACIDISE has been added to the Collins dictionary, it'll be added to the wordlist in the next update (which is next year, I think).
my last tournament i actually played ACIDISE 2x2 and opponent didnt challenge lmao
Maybe Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary deserve to be sources
The correct answer is to stop playing Scrabble. That's what I've done, and I've never been happier!
I have three rules for board games which I will play:
1. It cannot be completely random.
2. It cannot be Monopoly.
3. It cannot be Scrabble.
Thanks for explaining how the Scrabble dictionary came about!
Wait till they find out that qwerty is playable (in some dictionaries)
Great explanation! I stopped playing Scrabble long ago because I love the written word, not memorizing words that are good for use in Scrabble play.
That being said, I am surprised people thought qi was an invalid word. Not only is that one incredibly useful in Scrabble, it's also a fairly common word these days. Za is not as common, but I can see why they would've added it.
I'm getting into scrabble because of your videos. (:
Fascinating, both the video and the fact that so many can’t stand these words?! When I would play Scrabble with my family I would always be the one trying to put down two letter words and hear “that’s not a word”. So when I discovered that all these funky words are played COMPETITIVELY I felt very vindicated.
I think all these short strange words are what makes competitive Scrabble so much more interesting. We get those “overlaying plays” dumping for “fishing” and just gives the game that high skill ceiling.
Oh no… I’m Scrabblepilled……
Newsflash: the reason you don't understand it is because you're the one causing the bad reputation Scrabble fans have.
The intro was amazing 😂