The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Third Edition)
by Merriam-Webster

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Book Reviews of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Third Edition)

Book Review: Not Official, Not a Dictionary, Not Scrabble, Not for School
Summary: 1 Stars

This is no longer the official source used in clubs and tournaments. Their official wordlist includes about 200 forms ranging from what is mildly offensive mainly in lexicographic circles (e.g.: libber, peeing) to extremely offensive (the f-word, the n-word, etc.). The latest printing of the paperback OSPD, 3rd edition, has silently deleted about a dozen forms (da, skiwears, etc.) to make it less unofficial, though at the cost of making it slightly incompatible with earlier printings that your neighbors might use.

It's not a dictionary. Definitions are often so incomplete that you cannot even use this book to check spellings. Pronunciations are non-existent. It is sometimes not straightforward to find what is listed, so that REGLOW is present, though it appears several pages before REGMA. The overwhelming majority of people who enjoy Scrabble want to know more about words than this opuscule provides.

Whether it's Scrabble is a thornier question. Most people tend to regard Scottish words as foreign words not acceptable under the rules. With this dictionary you don't even have the opportunity to reject Scotticisms, since they're not marked. And there are a lot of them, the majority from that 30-year-old out-of-print dictionary, which hadn't been thoroughly revised in at least 60 years. On the other hand, fewer than half the Scottish words you might find in a Scottish-English literary work are present, and still fewer of the Scottish words found in a typical Scottish-language website. (I refer to Scottish, not Gaelic.)

Most people think that Scrabble words should be spelled correctly, yet many OSPD entries reflect spellings no longer found in dictionaries, some of which appeared only briefly in only one of the five college dictionaries which were consulted in one or more printings to form this book. Nearly all English words had a variety of spellings before civilization settled on a correct one. In particular, some sixty years ago scientists agreed internationally on the spellings of certain technical terms, thereby rejecting spellings (such as chlorin and chlorid) that still abound in the OSPD, even though they disappeared from the better dictionaries long ago and have for the most part disappeared even from the dictionaries from which they were taken thirty years ago.

Some OSPD words are immediately suspect, such as et as in "I et my supper". You can find this in precisely one currently available college dictionary. You won't be able to check most suspect words in whatever dictionary you happen to own, since they're found in only one of the various editions consulted, often not the most recent printing. In other words the very lexicographers who originally included the suspect word often rejected it for a future printing. Skilless, outcavil, miseat, toadless, afars, ..., the list seems endless.

I certainly wouldn't recommend this book for schools, or any place where children might be present! I recognize that spelling and grammar are not as highly regarded as they used to be, but if a child's first exposure is to the spelling janty (unused for a couple of centuries and found only in the out-of-print 1973 dictionary) then the standard jaunty will always seem strange. And similarly for hundreds or thousands of other examples.

In fact, based on a partial survey, I would estimate that 5% of the OSPD words cannot be found in any current dictionary. This includes a number of short words that will appear on virtually every gameboard if you choose OSPD. Even two-letter words such as al, es, de (as in Charles de Gaulle), and a couple others are in the 5%.

On the other hand, once you use OSPD for a while you will be accustomed to seeing informal words, so the absence of perp will astonish you. The eminently useful word qi may well be familiar to you from real life and is probably in whatever current college dictionary you may own (and even for Scrabble you must have such a dictionary to check on words longer than 8 letters), but it's not in OSPD. This work was last revised about a decade ago and you might as well wait for an up-to-date version, though since it is unofficial, a new edition may be further away than the long-awaited 4th Unabridged.

The best that can be said for this book is that your regular college dictionary is unlikely to provide any basis for accepting vainest and plainer while rejecting mainer and mainest, or for drawing a line somewhere in a list such as stupider, rapider, vapider, hispider. The OSPD line may not always be sensible: e.g., exactly one of positiver and negativer is acceptable, and loudlier is one of five comparative -ly adverbs. So if this sort of issue is one you cannot resolve in any other way, you may want this book, especially if you agree to use only a standard dictionary for browsing.

I would nonetheless recommend using a standard college dictionary for Scrabble. The American Heritage High School Dictionary apparently contains everything in the College edition except for words that provoke offense, so it would be suitable for school use. If your friends and neighbors use some other dictionary for Scrabble, that should only increase the variety the game affords so long as you treat the matter sensibly.

Summary of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Third Edition)

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