For example, the back cover declares "Features more than 100,000 two-to-eight-letter words, including 4,000 new entries." But there are only about 84,000 such words, of which only around 3,200 are new, even if you treat "entries" as synonymous with "words" in this context.
The front flap claims "All entries are included in a single alphabetical list". If only. While TIDIES and TIDIEST appear together, UNTIDIES and UNTIDIEST do not. REPP and REPPED appear together, but REPPING must be found elsewhere. If you're trying to figure out which of LASER MASER TASER forms a word when spelled backward, you'll probably need to look in more than two places.
The claim that "Main entries include a brief definition (especially useful for less common words)" is open to question. ENOPHILE is defined "oenophile", URSID "a mammal of the family Ursidae"; many are simply defined "a mineral" or "a chemical". However, some are good. GLUCINUM: "a metallic element"?! One of the worst is BENZIDIN, "a hydrocarbon", which will come as a surprise to the nitrogens in the molecule; the spelling has been outdated for decades.
It is true that the book is endorsed by the National Scrabble Association (NSA), and the widely respected publisher Merriam is just reporting what NSA wants. Please don't shoot the messenger. Indeed, Merriam dissuaded NSA from dozens of forms even sillier than the ones highlighted in this review, which unfortunately are only a sampling. Left to its own devices, Merriam could no doubt come up with something much nicer.
The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) is a compilation of words from twelve U.S. college dictionaries from the last four decades. Four are still in print and, as the descendants of seven of the others, contain most but by no means all of their contributions. As a result, pronunciations, etymologies, and full definitions are no longer available for many entries, especially those found only in the source that has been out of print for a quarter century. NSA members like to twitter that they don't play your grandmother's Scrabble, but in many respects they're using her dictionary. It's a shame they can't bring the game into the 21st century.
Although the official rules have always sensibly banned foreign words, about fifty OSPD entries stem from words so designated in source dictionaries, such as DE as in "Charles de Gaulle". In addition there are a great many Scottish words, such as AE, JO, BRULZIE. Although I consider the politest and most accurate way to regard Scots is as a foreign language, a full discussion of all sides would be longer than this review. Suffice it to say that the Scots words are not marked in any way; if you use OSPD, you cannot choose to avoid them. Likewise for foreign words, substandard words such as BRUNG and ET ("ate"), disused spellings, AFARS, and so forth.
Consider the following thirty spellings:
alkalin asswage brillo burlesk carrom dandriff develope enuf enzym
foureyed goloshe humvee iodin janty jurassic lept mayvin naething
oxid pailsful penname quare ratan smerk sorel tramel umteenth vext
worrit ya
You or your spell-checker can correct most of them. A great many more OSPD forms can be added to the list. These obsolete or mistaken spellings are overwhelmingly rejected by modern lexicography, usually unanimously. OSPD is a fundamentally false portrayal of current English.
The cover recommends OSPD for schools. School Scrabble is doubtless a welcome development, and hurrah for the coaches who help out. But with spellings like those above, OSPD should not be welcomed into schools by students, parents, teachers, or coaches. Every year Merriam plays an important role in sponsoring the National Spelling Bee, a task they undertake with meticulous care. In 2004, LAGNIAPPE was in the Bee; OSPD shows only a spelling without the I that would have been rejected. In 2005, a contestant was eliminated for using the OSPD spelling AVOSET.
Entering my sixth decade of Scrabble activity, I have met quite a cross-section of enthusiasts, who fall into three groups. Members of the first group, about 15 or 20 percent of the total, want to play only with words they already know. They need a dictionary only to check spelling, and as we have seen, OSPD is worse than useless.
A second group, less than 1 percent, asks only to be directed to an official word list. Such people should web-search the National Scrabble Association posthaste, where many pleasant adventures await. But OSPD is not official for NSA clubs and tournaments. Instead, Merriam publishes an Official Word List, available only to NSA members. This list contains over 200 forms too offensive for an Amazon review, schools, the NSA website, or a televised championship game. It also contains roughly 200 forms deemed by NSA to have been omitted from OSPD in error by the pros at Merriam, and to be added to OSPD at some unspecified time. These include the above-mentioned enuf, Jurassic, and Brillo, and others in a similar vein. (The trademark Humvee is already in OSPD; in the introductory material, manufacturer Hasbro implores readers to respect their trademark Scrabble.) Another example is Latina, which along with Latino (already in OSPD) is normally capitalized as a routine politeness. But common courtesy, like common sense, does not inform the OSPD.
The third and final group, a sizable majority, likes Scrabble in part to learn new words. But they must be English words, orthographically and grammatically correct, and a part of the contemporary language. Clearly OSPD is not for them either. The money can be devoted to a standard college dictionary, any of which should be adequate for Scrabble.
Watching a talented player score 400 or even 500 points in an OSPD Scrabble game can be reminiscent of seeing a long home run off the bat of a slugger on steroids. It's astonishing that Merriam and Hasbro put up with any of this.
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