The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary
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Book Reviews of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary
Book Review: Ratholing
Summary: 5 Stars
The Official Scrabble Players DictionaryScrabble Scrabble is a game that my family seems to have played forever. Mom always had an old Webster dictionary about twenty pounds she declared was the one we used. If you got up and had to go over and look up a maybe word she called it ratholing out an answer. I started buying smaller dictionaries for table use in the 1950s. Mom didn't like it but she used those paperback books like every one else at the table. These books are perfect for table use and at the amazon price I buy enough of each edition to have 2 on the table for each family household. Who says you have to go to Disneyland when your family gets together. Yeah and all the grandkids can spell. Sort of sink or swim.Book Review: The "official" word on what's acceptable
Summary: 4 Stars
The official scrabble dictionary (OSD) serves its purpose: it is the authority when settling disputes. The make quality is that of your average mass market paperback, and so is the price. The definitions, on the other hand, are really perfunctory (but what do you expect?). Some words in the dictionary, like Za, Ka, and Ai, are surprising because they're not found in the commonly owned dictionaries. This makes playing with the OSD a different game, one in which it pays to memorize these little words.
The word "official" in the title of this product is like a 500 pound gorilla. No more excuses like you're using the "wrong" dictionary. Note: there are no swear words or words longer than 8 letters in this dictionary for the obvious reasons.
Book Review: To many two-letter foriegn words, e.g. xi, xu, qi
Summary: 2 Stars
I got this book because I was heading out on a month-long trip with some people I didn't know and they said they liked to play scrabble. I figured this would be the easy way to end all potential conflict between on this subject. It did that pretty well, but in part because we all did not like many of the words in this book.
I was especially appalled with the words Xi, xu, qi and others like that that converted scrabble from a game of leveraging your vocabulary to one of remembering odd otherwise-useless trivia about strange words.
The next time I play scrabble I am going to request that we either eliminate 2-letter words, or stick to ones that would have been in common english usage throughout the 20th century.
Book Review: scrabble fan
Summary: 3 Stars
This book is very handy, however we're looking for a different one. I do agree with the person who said that there are so many odd words that almost anything goes. I was a librarian and there were some words that I was convinced were not real "words" - Agentry for example! In other dictinaries they aren't listed but they are in this book. We bought the paperback version - not the large print. That was a mistake because it's very small print and it takes forever to find a word. However, we're big scrabble fans and use it often but since finding the word agentry we may throw it away. If you have great eyesight and like the strange words, then it's a good buy. However, I would recommend the hardback or the large print paperback.Book Review: Useful and Fun!
Summary: 5 Stars
Beyond being useful for playing Scrabble, this book is fun. It might be nice to just have a list of new words, but the reality isn't so bad: you can spend some relaxing time just peeking through the book to find new words and what they mean. This book is worth it just for identifying the first acceptable two-letter Q/Q-without-U word, Qi. No longer must you be able to spell just Qat when you get stuck with the Q at the very end of the game without an accompanying U.
For those folks who want the "dirty" words as well, it can always be agreed in advance to use the current Webster's dictionary or whatever in addition to this book. You need to do that anyway for words with more than eight letters.