The Strangeness of Words

Word games are a huge and entertaining category of pasttimes.  Whether it's Scrabble, Words with Friends, Word Collect, Boggle, or any of hundreds of other board games and apps, there is one underlying issue with them all ... the strangeness of the dictionaries.

Which words are accepted by which dictionaries?  And why?  What exactly makes a word a part of the "English language", or your native language.  It's not just the words commonly used, a good dictionary goes way beyond that, but then every dictionary has some head-scratching inclusions and exclusions.

I have played a lot of Scrabble over the years, including one tournament at the local library.  Arguments break out so frequently over some lesser-known words, and how many times have we reached for a dictionary only to find that the word we've used so many times isn't a thing after all?  Or, gloated over showing that a word like "anion" is real?

When I started in college, back at SUNY Stony Brook, I studied Linguistics, because these exact questions have fascinated me since I was a kid.  (Also, I wanted to be able to read ancient inscriptions.)  (But I switched to a Math major because all the courses were for living languages, focusing on speech instead of reading, and people tend to be real jerks when you try to learn their language, always teasing and grilling you on using the wrong syllables ... but I digress.)  The editors of a dictionary or a dictionary database have an essentially impossible task: choosing every word that is or isn't part of a language that is always changing.

Each person sits down at a game board with a different dictionary in their heads.  I have to specifically restrain myself from using subatomic particles and other technical phrases; there are so many niches, so many specialty fields, each with its own jargon-- who's to say which words are playable or not?

Obviously, proper names should not be used.  People's name have a nearly infinite variety (across every language in the world?) and are not valid, unless they have a slang meaning like joe, john, jane or bob (just kidding about bob).  Place names are even wilder: stop and think that every country and city in the world has its name in its native language, but most have different names in other languages, so England is also Ingleterra.  Yeah, that's not confusing.  But if there is a famous wine or drink or food named after that place, then somehow that makes it an "English word"?  Bordeaux, anyone?  How about if there's a lazy, shortened version of the name of a food or wine?  "Zin" is in the official Scrabble dictionary, but it's cringeworthy.

One of my favorite areas is foreign currency.  As a lifelong collector of stamps, and dabbler in coins and world currency, in my mind, things like yen and rupee and pice are commonplace.  An all-time favorite is "xu", the Mongolian currency: Scrabble tip: always play the "x" going two directions, on a double or triple space, you can thank me later.  But can they be considered "English words" in any reasonable sense?  How many currency traders are dealing in kwacha right now?  But could we really include some (because they're common) but exclude others (for being too exotic)?

Letters.  Did you know that each letter of the English alphabet has an actual name, and those names have spellings?  V is "vee", H is "aitch", Y is "wye".  Yup.  How are those a thing?  Even wackier, how are the names of Greek letters considered English words?  Alpha and beta, stick 'em together, you get the root of the word "alphabet", and they're used commonly enough, so okay.  But the you have to accept the plurals as well.  If a Greek word has more than one psi in it, then there are "psis".  Sure.  Hebrew letters would come next.  I know aleph well from the mathematics of infinities, and I've played "ayin" more than once, and "qoph" is fun as one of the few Q words without QU; I'm sure some of my Jewish friends could drop down the names of the rest of that alphabet, and I'd be happy to learn that extra bit of data.  But are they "English words"?  And then how does one international version get accepted and the other rejected?  The official Scrabble dictionary has "qoph" but not "qof".

How about the Cyrillic alphabet, which is probably the next most likely set of letters we might run into?  I know none of those, but looking at it now it's funny that "dobro" is a letter, since I only know it as the musical instrument.  Words are endlessly interesting.

And how old can a word be and still be accepted?  Not every Middle English to Shakespearean ending is reasonably usable anymore.  Sure, you "hath" a great word in mind, but nobody has spoken that way in centuries, but it's still in most dictionaries, and while you may still "giveth" a good argument, "explaineth" is beyond the pale. 

Units of measurement?  This is the near shore of the vast realm of scientific vocabulary, but even these are hugely varied.  There are antiquated measures like "hod", good short words like "ohm", and real memory benders like "bel" (you are used to the loudness of sounds being measured in decibels, right?  Well, a decibel is just a tenth of a bel).  Are these really "English words" if they only come up in technical talk?

Shortened words like "repo" and "refi"?  They are used all the time.  But acronyms aren't word words.  A few brand named like xerox and kleenex have even busted out into common speech, but who gets to decide when they are common enough to be words?

So don't be too surprised if your favorite word game dictionary, whether it's printed or digital, has some messy edges when it comes to what words can be scored.