This is my point of view. Feel free to disagree :)
Scrabble being a word game with rules on word validity (no proper names, etc.), a reasonable addon is to have some sort of list of valid words. For the first three decades or so this was mostly in the form of a dictionary, to which the game rules were then applied to determine whether a move was valid if challenged. In 1978 in the US the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) was published, providing a no-arguments list of valid 2-8 letter words with short definitions and inflections. Britain followed suit in 1988 with 'Official Scrabble Words' (OSW), a straight alphabetical listing of 2 to 9 letter words and inflections. Thus for English language play there existed two word lists depending on the country. The OSPD is now in its third edition and OSW in its fourth.
In 1991 the first English World Championships were held and a natural question was which dictionary to use. The sensible compromise of using both was decided upon and this has been the case ever since. The term 'SOWPODS' has been coined to describe the combined list, being an anagram of OSPD plus OSW. In the 1990s many countries played to SOWPODS, a few to OSPD and one, the UK, to OSW. In 2002 the UK switched to SOWPODS via a year-long switchover called 'The Way Forward', thus leaving the US and a few others with OSPD and everyone else playing SOWPODS. The OSW fourth edition was replaced by the OSW International edition (OSWI), the first official SOWPODS list. The US in fact does not use the OSPD3 but a slight modification which allows 'offensive' words which were removed from the public book. This is known as the Official Tournament and Club Word List, or TWL98.
So we have: US - TWL98, most of the rest of the English speaking Scrabble world - OSWI, the latter containing all the words in TWL98 plus some more. I use US as a catch-all for the US and the other countries because the US has by far the largest population of Scrabble players.
The problem then arises that once one has used a large list, such as OSWI, playing to a smaller one, such as TWL98, is made more difficult because one must remember in which list the words were valid. Given the sheer number of words in the lists, this is not a simple task, and many players have expressed that 'unlearning' words is perhaps not as much fun as learning them. A few numbers help to clarify the situation as it stands at present (and no I didn't count them - it's all available as computer files!):
| Word Length |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
Total |
| No. Valid Words in OSWI |
121 |
1229 |
5155 |
11812 |
20964 |
31229 |
38043 |
108553 |
| No. Valid Words in TWL98 |
96 |
972 |
3903 |
8636 |
15232 |
23109 |
28419 |
80367 |
| Difference (all words in TWL98
are in OSWI) |
25 |
257 |
1252 |
3176 |
5732 |
8120 |
9624 |
28186 |
Thus there are 28186 words which one cannot play in the US compared with most other countries. (For root words of 9 or more letters it is a little more complicated, but these occur less often. There are still many more in OSWI.)
At this point objective fact gives way to my opinions...
Firstly, I must admit to a little personal bias, having just moved to the US from the UK, and thus having played OSW, the OSWI but never TWL98. I thus am starting from scratch with the 28186 if I want to play in the US. However...
One would think that it would be more sensible if all countries used the same list. After all, there is a World Championship, and players from around the world at all levels compete in tournaments and over the Internet. What do we gain from having two different word lists? The difficulty is that Scrabble is a commercially owned game and the owners in the US (Hasbro) are not the same as most other countries (Mattel). There are thus contracts with the producers of the dictionaries and because tournament players are a tiny minority of the total number who play the game, the need for profit outweighs the needs of the tournament players. Having said that, it is up to the players to decide which word list is valid for tournament play, and thus the US could vote to switch to OSWI. In 2000 however they decided to stick with TWL98. From the crossword-games-pro list, there were various reasons, including not wanting to have to learn more words, being happy with the list as it is, not wanting to have to purchase additional books, etc. and not wanting all those strange foreign words. Curiously, these were also all cited as reasons by those in the UK who voted against the addition of the TWL98 words in the switch to OSWI.
The point about the strange words in OSWI is valid. There are a lot of obsolete, Shakesperian, Spenserian and dialect words in the list which the Americans and others rightly feel have little relevance to them or anyone today, and I agree. However, there are many words which are not obsolete, and are simply in one dictionary but not the other. The TWL98 is also far from perfect, with many questionable words of its own. The most sensible way forward would be for both sides to compromise, with the US accepting many of the words in OSWI, but with the obsolete (etc.) words there removed. This would result in a certain amount of learning for some and unlearning for others but at the end we would have a single dictionary, and the game could progress to its full worldwide potential. Sadly, I suspect that OSWI people would be unwilling to give up words and TWL98 people would vote against a move of this sort, although in my experience, the US club members I have played wouldn't mind the change, especially when the say 'oh I wish this was a word', and I point out that it is in OSWI (I refrain from giving them a running commentary however). In fact my overriding feeling at the club is being sorry for the rest of them stuck with their list which has so much not on it, and for myself when I find a great move, only to discover it's not allowed because one of the words is OSWI only. (In fact, at the club I go to, club #590 in Champaign, Illinois, they kindly allowed me to use a list of 2s-8s which are OSWI only, so I didn't suffer the actual loss of a turn. I now play without it.)
At the end of the day, there are more important issues in the world, but it is just frustrating because it has all the hallmarks of something 'whose time has not yet come' simply because most people don't like change and are not ready for it. It would be my bet that once the single list is adopted, people will wonder what the fuss was all about. The frustration is that we must continue to have the debate.
Last modified: Tue Jul 5 22:56:47 CDT 2005