Hundreds of words missing from the Scrabble dictionary
From Donald Sauter@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 27 12:03:37 2019
And here is the (meager) discussion this revelation generated on the NASPA Facebook group:
Sara Corbin> 1978 was a long time ago, brother.
But 2019 is right now, and the words are still missing.
Sara Corbin> Why should we be using UNFREQUENT when we have the perfectly good word INFREQUENT?
Because UNFREQUENT is in at least one of the dictionaries used as the basis for the North American Scrabble word list. Do you know something we don't, that Scrabble has a rule disallowing synonyms? (Do you disallow UNALIENABLE?)
Emmalee James> A bunch of them are good in CSW [the world Scrabble word list]
I was actually expecting this irrelevant observation from the Collins patrol boys who are always ready to jump on anything North American here. (Or has this become a World Scrabble group operating under the old name?)
Peter Hillerup> Perhaps the list should be restricted to words of 15 letters or less. UNCONTRADICTABLE has 16 letters by my count.
Good catch. You found one of the errors I planted. Another was UNFLAVORED, which finally became good March 1 2019. (I had alerted NASPA to that omission some years ago.) The third was UNEXPENDIBLE. This is obviously a typo in the old Funk & Wagnalls;
the main entry has it right, EXPENDABLE.
From Donald Sauter@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 27 11:59:58 2019
Here are 628 words missing from the North American Scrabble word list. I've alerted the NASPA dictionary committee and also posted this to the NASPA Facebook group. Nobody gives a hoot so I'm archiving it here.
All the words here appear in one or more of the source dictionaries used in creating the official word list in 1978. Note that they are all understandable and more or less reasonable - some are practically everyday words - and most could easily be
formed on a recreational or tournament Scrabble board by stretching a common, shorter word.
I left in a few goofs for those folks who like puzzles. Have fun!