From Abeigh to Zonk: the art of playing Scrabble

Some time ago we were given a copy of Collins's Scrabble Dictionary. We have always been partial to a game of Scrabble, and would occasionally challenge one another's entries, objecting to the spelling or doubting whether a certain word really existed. As an aid to arbitration we would resort to a conventional dictionary whose word was to be accepted as law, even if you knew that you were right and the dictionary wrong or plain ignorant. Like a cricket umpire. The mutual assumption is that players would only enter words they were pretty sure about and could explain if challenged. What else is a game of scrabble for, if not to test the players' vocabulary and spelling ? We had a house rule that foreign words were ineligible unless found in a small conventional dictionary - words like fete or risotto or maximum or (perhaps) angst.

So much for decent compromise and consensus (there, you see, a Latin term but allowable): the Scrabble Dictionary has changed all that. The advantage is handed now to the expert in foreign languages or archaic usages. I have turned at random to page 560, and what have I found ? Perswaded is the first entry (an 'obsolete form'), and this page's four columns include pertake, perthite (a form of feldspar), perthitic, pertusate, pertuse, to perv (to 'give a person an erotic look'), perviate, pervicacy, pesade, pesant and pesaunt (both 'obsolete spellings of peasant'), pesewa ('Ghanain monetary unit worth one hundredth of a cedi'), pessima, pesterous, petabyte, petahertz, petaline, petalodic, petar ('obsolete variant of petard'), petara ('a clothes basket'), petary ('a weapon for hurling stones'), petasus and petasuses (both variants of petasos - 'a broad-brimmed hat worn by the ancient Greeks'), petaurist ('a flying phalanger'), petchary ('a type of kingbird'), petcock ('a small valve for checking the water level in a steam boiler or draining condensed steam from the cylinder of a steam engine'), petechial, pether ('old variant of pedlar'), pethidine, petillant, and petiolule. And that's on only a single one of the dictionary's 882 pages -which suggests that there are some twenty-eight thousand, two hundred and twenty-four such outlandish words for the keen scrabbler to memorise. Start tonight.

The only valuable use of this dictionary that I have discovered as a player is to enable me to invent an unknown word, cunningly place the tiles over a triple score square, pretend to look it up, and then, nodding wisely, announce that it is a term used by ancient Persians to denote a phial half full of sour wine, or by Russian genealogists to indicate the relationship between a man and his wife's great-grandmother. Then you quickly slam the dictionary shut and tell the person on your left that it's their turn.

From Abeigh to Zonk: the art of playing Scrabble