John Chew, co-president of NASPA, in front of the message board at the 2010 North American Scrabble Championships in Reno, NV.
Fogarty: If you’ve listened to this podcast for a long time, you know that people can get emotional about dictionaries. Well, it turns out, there’s a simmering brouhaha in the Scrabble world about which dictionary, or word list, players should use for official tournament play, and this is no light matter because some of these tournaments come with hefty cash prizes, as much as $10,000.
Scrabble was invented in the 1930s, but people didn’t start playing tournaments until the ‘70s, and because tournament culture emerged independently in Britain and the U.S., the Scrabble world ended up with two groups that use different official dictionaries. Players in Britain use what’s called the international word list or the Collins word list because it’s managed by the Collins Dictionary, and people in the U.S. use the North American word list, which is managed by Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster publishes a book knowns as the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary—it’s the red one you’ve probably seen in stores—but it isn’t the official dictionary for tournaments, at least not for adults. It doesn’t contain offensive words, so it’s used for school Scrabble tournaments, but adult tournaments use a more expansive list that’s controlled by the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA), which works closely with Merriam-Webster.
Because there are these two competing word lists, in this ballroom, there are actually two competitions: one between players who play the North American list and one between players who play the international list. And the difference between the two lists is huge—enormous.
Here’s Stefan Fatsis, Scrabble player and author of Word Freak, who was competing in Reno:
Fatsis: The problem is that we’ve established in North America this one list, and the English Scrabble people established another list. And this goes back three decades, so it’s been very difficult to bridge those two worlds. I think if the word lists were closer in volume it would be a lot easier—if the gap wasn’t 90,000 words overall, and a fair number, 25 more two-letter words, some hundreds, xx hundred, more 3-letter words. It’s a pretty big gulf. It’s a big difference and it does change the game.
Fogarty: You might wonder why would anyone voluntarily learn 90,000 more words. That’s a lot. Well, there are a few reasons. There are far more places in the world to play the international list, so if you want to be a Scrabble tourist, it makes sense to learn the international list. Here’s John Chew, co-president of the North American Scrabble Association and the chair of the dictionary committee:
Chew: If you want to travel the world as a Scrabble tourist—and it’s a thing—then being able to play with the international lexicon is essential. There are a few places in the world that play with the North American dictionary, such as part of Israel and much of Thailand, and that’s about it at this point, but everywhere else, they use the international dictionary, because again, the need to have a common reference for the English language that includes words that everyone from every country finds familiar is what drives the ever increasing number of words in the international dictionary.
Fogarty: If you want to travel, playing the international word list is good. And then that huge list with 90,000 extra words gives competitors who have been playing a long time a new goal, a higher mountain to climb, so to speak.
Fatsis: People want a different challenge, so if you’ve been playing competitive Scrabble for 10 or 20 years, you think, “I learned these words, I‘m going to learn some more words,” and Collins definitely gives players the opportunity to learn a lot more words.
Fogarty: A third argument for committing to just one word list is online play. There’s an independent organization called the Internet Scrabble Club that holds competitions called The Virtuals.
Fatsis: There’s definitely a fertile place online for playing Scrabble, and it’s another argument for unifying the world. I don’t need to travel to England or Australia or Malaysia to play other good players, I can just do it online, so if we were all doing it online with the same word list it would be a more interesting place maybe.
Fogarty: Although there were still a lot more people playing the North American list at this big championship—the Collins section seemed to take up only a few tables in the whole ballroom— Fatsis says that more and more North American players have been becoming Collins players.
Fatsis: What’s happened in North America is that many of the top players have stopped playing the North American Scrabble word list and are playing the collins word list, so rather than have at this tournament one fantastic, super competitive division with all of the best players in North America and other parts of the word playing against each other, you have this split. So the effect has been that the the upper ranks of competitive Scrabble in North America have been diminished by the defection of dozens of players to the international word list.
Fogarty: He’s seen the change at his local club too.
Fatsis: When I go to my Scrabble club in Washington every Tuesday night, I’m one of the best players now—well, one of the best players—which is sad because I’m not that good. And the better players that used to come every week have taken up Collins, so personally, it’s made it less fun for me on a weekly basis because I enjoy the challenge of playing players that are far better than I.
Fogarty: So a lot of the top players are defecting to the Collins list, but because the list is so much bigger—remember it’s about 90,000 mord words to memorize—people aren’t flocking to it in droves. My impression is that the average players or even the relatively good competitors like Fatsis aren’t making the change because it’s just too daunting. So right now the two lists co-exist and North American tournaments like this one have two tracks.
A lot of people seem to think that the different corporate entities involved will make coming up with a unified list hard. Scrabble in North America is owned by Hasbro and Merriam-Webster publishes the word list, but Scrabble overseas is owned by Mattel and Collins publishes the world list. But, at least if you listen to Peter Sokolowski from Merriam-Webster, it doesn’t sound like a solution is impossible:
Sokolowski: The million dollar question is Is there a time where one can foresee that there’s only one list that’s simpler for anybody? Nobody knows. It’s not in any one entities hand’s. Merriam, NASPA, Hasbro, Mattel, and it could work, and it could be a lot simpler for everyone.
Early Scrabble Dictionaries and How New Words Get Added to the Lists
Fogarty: A few interesting tidbits are that the first dictionary used in North American Scrabble back in the ’70s was called Funk & Wagnalls, which you may remember from skits if you ever watched the TV show Laugh-In where they would say, “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls!”
And, if you’ve never looked at a Scrabble dictionary, you may be surprised because it has only the barest of definitions.
Chew: There’s only one meaning there to remind you what the word is and what part of speech it is, and there won’t be additional nuances or meanings. A lot of words are just defined as “a mineral,” or “a tropical plant,” or “a monetary unit.” It’s a very different way of looking at the language.
Fogarty: And it annoys Scrabble players that regular dictionaries don’t include the official plural of words.
Chew: For instance words like mankind, should it take an S? Maybe, maybe not. Should we talk about alternative realities in which there might be different mankinds or different timelines? If in such a context it would be legitimately possible to legitimately pluralize a word, does that still make it a word that ought to be acceptable in Scrabble? And these are questions regular dictionaries don’t answer much to the chagrin of Scrabble players, and this is why we have official Scrabble dictionaries.
Fogarty: And the lexicographers at Merriam-Webster are the final arbiters of whether mankinds is a playable plural of mankind. And it’s not, at least not in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. A word they did recently add to the official list though is xed, as in “He xed out the name,” even though single-letter words usually aren’t allowed. Jim Pate, a retired librarian from Birmingham, Alabama who’s been either a member or chair of the NASPA dictionary committee for about 20 years, explains:
Pate: The letter X was interesting because it was the only letter that had two infections. xed, meaning “to cross out,” and x-ing, meaning “crossing out,” and so I and others were for including xed in this list. It didn't get included then, but in the most recent dictionary, word list update, we threw it in the hopper again, and it got included. So it’s the part tense of “to mark out.”
Fogarty: X-ing didn’t make it in though because x-ing always has a hyphen and words with punctuation aren’t allowed.
Jim notes that the dictionary committee turns in two lists to Merriam-Webster: One list of words they’re sure about, and another list of words that are more questionable, such as mankier.
Pate: One of the iffy things is When can an adjective be inflected to -er or -ier? When it’s a certain length? When it has a certain usage or meaning? So a lot of those things were on our “I think it might be a good word, but we don’t know.”
Fogarty: What’s an example?
Pate: Mankier.
Fogarty: Manky essentially means “bad—worthless, dirty, rotten,” and the lexicographers agreed that one thing can be mankier than another, so mankier is good, official Scrabble word.
The NASPA dictionary committee looks at a lot of different dictionaries as they’re making the list of potential new words to submit to Merriam-Webster, and in this last round they included a Canadian dictionary in the mix—and that gave them some interesting new words from Canadian Native American Tribes such as the Inuit.
Pate: In Canada, just like in the United States, there are native tribes that use certain letters to represent a sound, Q for example, so in this latest update of the official word list you can spell kayak Q-A-J-A-Q because the sound is there, and they use those letters to represent. It’s a very strange looking word, which raises a few eyebrows.
Fogarty: It’s probably worth a lot of points.
Pate: It certainly is, but there’s only one Q in the set, so to make that word, you’d have to make one of the blanks a Q and then get the points from the Q and the J.
How to Start Your Own School Scrabble Club
Fogarty: Finally, because it’s the beginning of the school year, I’m going to end today with how you can set up a Scrabble club at your school and get your kids competing. After spending all day at the Scrabble competition, I started wondering why schools don’t have Scrabble clubs. They have chess clubs. Why not Scrabble? Well, it turns out they do, there are just a lot fewer of them, but Chew, not surprisingly, sings their praises.
Chew: You go into any classroom and there will be a few kids, who if they were playing Scrabble on a regular basis would be much happier kids with much higher self esteem, and I’ve had many times the delightful experience of teaching a bunch of kids Scrabble and watching an 8-year-old kid realizing for the first time in his life that he’s better than his classmates at something, and then people look up to him.
Fogarty: To have a club, you need to enlist a teacher.
Chew: The best approach I’ve found is to go to your teacher and tell them that you’d be willing to help them run a school scrabble club—that’s what I do—and then you get them hooked, and then they’ll want to help you with it. There are resources available online that help teachers justify the educational benefits of school Scrabble, and you can order a school Scrabble kit from Hasbro that has a bunch of boards and so on.
Fogarty: And for kids in grades four through eight, they can compete in their own national Scrabble championship.
Chew: The key event annually for school Scrabble is a national North American championship that will take place somewhere on the east coast in April or May of each year, and it’s timed so that teachers can run a school Scrabble club over the course of their school year and then toward the end of the the school year take their best students to compete and see how they do at the national level. If you’re a parent and you have school-aged children, especially those who are eligible for school Scrabble—grades 4 to 8—then talk to your teacher.
Fogarty: I still have tons of interesting tidbits about some of the the odd ways the masters memorize so many words, why there are more people who compete in English Scrabble in Thailand than in the US, Canada, or Britain; what is the deal with people who play Scrabble in languages they don’t even speak—and win championships—how it’s surprisingly easy for you, yes you, to compete in the National Scrabble Championships, and some strategy tips to at least help you beat your friends, but this week, I’m out of time. This kind of episode takes three to four times longer to produce than a regular show, so I expect I will have Scrabble Part 2 ready the week after next.
Thanks again to Peter Sokolowski, John Chew, Jim Pate, and Stefan Fatsis for letting me visit their world and for taking time away from their duties at the championships to talk with me. I was in heaven.
I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can find me on Twitter and Facebook as Grammar Girl. That’s all. Thanks for listening.
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http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/how-new-words-get-added-to-the-scrabble-dictionaries-yes-dictionaries-plural
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