2 ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
\r
5 The ENABLE2K supplement includes a number of auxiliary files of words
\r
6 not generally allowed in Scrabble (r), but which may be of use in
\r
7 Scrabble variants, anagramming, or other word games. They may also
\r
8 possibly be of general interest.
\r
10 The rules of Scrabble make the following requirements on playable
\r
13 1. They must have a traditional part of speech (noun, adjective, etc.),
\r
14 2. They must not be capitalized (interpreted in American play as not
\r
15 allowing any capital letters),
\r
16 3. They must not be abbreviations, prefixes or suffixes,
\r
17 4. They must not require a hyphen or apostrophe (or any other symbol
\r
18 which is not a letter).
\r
20 In addition to the words forbidden by these rules, two other sorts of
\r
21 words are by general agreement forbidden, though they would seem to be
\r
22 allowed by the above list. These are acronyms, and inflections of
\r
25 Some acronyms, such as "snafu" and "awol" are not problematic for
\r
26 Scrabble, while others, such as "pdq" and "tko", are. The distinction
\r
27 is whether the word is pronounced as a sequence of letters. For
\r
28 purposes of this discussion, I limit the use of the word "acronym" to
\r
29 this latter class. (I also stipulate that "Io" is not an acronym in
\r
30 this sense, despite its pronunciation. This will be relevant if "Io"
\r
31 (a kind of moth) ever loses its capitalization.)
\r
33 Acronyms of this sort have generally been listed in dictionaries as
\r
34 abbreviations, but in recent years, with the proliferation of acronyms in
\r
35 everyday usage, this practice is changing. Some dictionaries now list
\r
36 many acronyms as full-fledged words with parts of speech. For instance, a
\r
37 majority of popular American dictionaries list "pdq" as an adverb. Such
\r
38 acronyms do not seem to be excluded by the rules listed above. In fact,
\r
39 the word "pdq" is listed in printed copies of the OSPD (r) third edition,
\r
40 though I understand this listing is considered to be erroneous. The file
\r
41 LCACR.LST contains all the lower-case acronyms listed with a part of
\r
42 speech by any of the 5 ENABLE source dictionaries (see 2DICTS.DOC). In
\r
43 the absence of better information, plural formation by adding a lower-case
\r
44 "s" has been assumed. I have to mention that the acronym "rbi" is given a
\r
45 secondary pronunciation by the Webster's New World College Dictionary,
\r
46 which is the same as that of "ribby". If this pronunciation ever becomes
\r
47 the primary pronunciation, I will have to reluctantly accept "rbi" as a
\r
48 full-fledged English word.
\r
50 (I note, for the record, that the decisions made by lexicographers as
\r
51 to which acronyms are words and which abbreviations seem quite arbitrary.
\r
52 Why "pdq" is an adverb, but "asap", which is even pronounceable, is not,
\r
53 is a mystery. One presumes that with the passage of time standards will
\r
54 be developed for making this distinction, and that lexicographers will
\r
55 do better at abiding by them.)
\r
57 Another set of troublesome words is the set containing inflections of
\r
58 one-letter words, such as "ps" and "xed". Nothing in the Scrabble
\r
59 rules forbids these words, which are listed by several of the source
\r
60 dictionaries, including MW10. Despite this, in practice these words
\r
61 are never allowed. These words, which are otherwise self-explanatory,
\r
62 are listed in the file LETTERS.LST.
\r
64 Yet a third set of troublesome words is the set of "pronunciation
\r
65 spellings", which includes "gonna", "wanna" and "lemme". (The
\r
66 Encarta (r) dictionary calls these words "contractions", which is
\r
67 perhaps a better designation.) These words are clearly not allowed in
\r
68 Scrabble play, as they have no part of speech. Words of this sort from
\r
69 the ENABLE2K source dictionaries are listed in the file NOPOS.LST. I note
\r
70 four words which resemble pronunciation spellings, but which are listed in
\r
71 OSPDADD.LST because they have parts of speech: "gotcha", an interjection,
\r
72 "gotta", a verb, and "outa"/"outta", which are prepositions.
\r
74 ENABLE2K includes two additional files of interesting words containing
\r
75 upper-case characters (and therefore unavailable for use in Scrabble).
\r
76 These files were inspired by the description in the printed OSPD of
\r
77 permitted Scrabble words. Instead of giving a non-capitalization
\r
78 requirement, OSPD states that "proper names" are not allowed. This is
\r
79 of course inaccurate, as not every capitalized word is a proper name
\r
80 (e.g., "Iraqi", "Napoleonic", "Pleistocene" or "Ritalin"), and not
\r
81 every proper name is capitalized (e.g., "pinyin", "cinquecento"). This
\r
82 misstatement inspired the production of a list of capitalized words
\r
83 which are not proper names from two of the source dictionaries (MW10
\r
84 and WNW4; AHD4 and RHWCD2 were added for the second version of the
\r
85 ENABLE2K Supplement). Actually, two lists were produced, UPPER.LST,
\r
86 which contains most such words, and UCACR.LST, which contains those words
\r
87 which are acronyms. (The definition of "acronym" given above is used
\r
88 here, so that "SAM", "GUI" and even "RFLP" are not considered to be
\r
89 acronyms. In fact, I treat any word pronounced as the sequence of its
\r
90 letters as an acronym, even when the word does not conform to the
\r
91 classical definition. For instance, I treat "Rx" as an acronym, even
\r
92 though it does not abbreviate any "R- x-" phrase.)
\r
94 In many cases, it was not completely straightforward to decide whether
\r
95 a word was or was not a proper name, and doubtless some of my decisions
\r
96 were wrong. I included a name if any definition was not a proper name,
\r
97 even if the most common definition was. For instance, I included
\r
98 "Solomon" (a very wise man), even though the most common use of this
\r
99 word is as a proper name. Some of the assumptions I made in winnowing
\r
100 out the proper names were as follows: Names of languages (both human
\r
101 and computer) are proper names, but names of religions and ideologies
\r
102 are not. Names of holy books (like "Bible" and "Avesta") are not proper
\r
103 names, but chapters of such books are. Designations of specific times
\r
104 or historical events (like "Holocaust") are proper names, but recurring
\r
105 events ("January") or prophecied events which have not yet taken place
\r
106 ("Ragnarok") are not. Of course, all these rules apply only to nouns,
\r
107 not to other parts of speech. The noun "Arabic" could not be listed,
\r
108 but the adjective was no problem. I went strictly "by the book" in this
\r
109 regard. "Romansch" is defined as a noun (a regional language of
\r
110 Switzerland). From this, one could reasonably infer that "Romansch" is
\r
111 also used as an adjective, but since this part of speech was never
\r
112 explicitly shown, I chose not to include this word. I maintained a
\r
113 similar pedantic distinction between dynasties (proper names) and dynasty
\r
114 members (not proper names), thus explaining why "Hohenzollern" is listed,
\r
115 but "Medici" is not.
\r
117 Determining the plurals of many of these upper-case words proved even
\r
118 more challenging than for their lower-case brethren. Listed plurals
\r
119 usually represent my best guess, and may therefore be incorrect,
\r
120 perhaps, upon occasion, laughably so. For nouns with a final capital
\r
121 letter (whether pronounced as acronyms or not), I assume a plural
\r
122 ending in "'s", unless some other plural is listed. Thus, for most of
\r
123 the acronymic words, no plural is shown.
\r
125 I should further note that I assumed that all trade marks which were
\r
126 not marked with a part of speech were nouns, and had plurals. This
\r
127 upon occasion resulted in some dubious entries like "FedExes" and
\r
128 "Technicolors" in the list.
\r
130 Even if the upper-case word lists are worthless for your intended use
\r
131 of ENABLE, they are worth glancing at, if for no other reason than as a
\r
132 reminder of how arbitrary the distinctions between noun, proper name and
\r
133 abbreviation (like most formal distinctions in the English language)
\r
138 Scrabble is a trademark of the Milton Bradley Co., Inc.
\r
139 The OSPD is a trademark of the Milton Bradley Co., Inc.
\r
140 Encarta is a trademark of the Microsoft Corp.
\r
projects / deb_pkgs / scowl.git / blob