winning word not in dictionary?

[nmgyrl]

Hello,

When I finished the puzzle with ?u=35a1fd34c5d79af1ac6df7445f2949841571789268 in its URL, the tally showed the best/longest word is "escribano". But when I clicked on that word to see its definition, the lexic.us dictionary said it doesn't exist. Couple of screenshots attached. All the Google search results for it are in Spanish. It doesn't appear to be an English word at all, so I'm wondering how it was accepted by Wordtwist. Thank you!
20191022_BadWordtwistDictionaryResult.jpg 20191022_BadWordtwistWord_u=35a1fd34c5d79af1ac6df7445f2949841571789268.jpg

[JJBeanie]

Hi nmgyrl,

Wordtwist uses the SOWPODS scrabble word list. If a word is listed there, it's accepted. I'm not sure what version of SOWPODS is used here.

Lexic.us is not as comprehensive, although there are some words that it has that SOWPODS doesn't (or rather the version wordtwist uses doesn't). For example, "ableness" is on Lexic.us but isn't accepted in wordtwist games. Clicking on the word and getting the definition from Lexic.us is a nice, quick feature that the Puzzle Baron has implemented for us. SOWPODS is a lot more cumbersome to use for definitions.

Finally, "escribano" is a noun meaning a clerk or scribe, according to Collins dictionary.

[Nylimb]

Hello,

When I finished the puzzle with ?u=35a1fd34c5d79af1ac6df7445f2949841571789268 in its URL, the tally showed the best/longest word is "escribano". But when I clicked on that word to see its definition, the lexic.us dictionary said it doesn't exist. Couple of screenshots attached. All the Google search results for it are in Spanish. It doesn't appear to be an English word at all, so I'm wondering how it was accepted by Wordtwist. Thank you!

The short answer is that WordTwist's word list has nothing to do with the lexic.us dictionary. Instead, it was obtained by merging some online word lists. WordTwist used to use SOWPODS, a word list created mainly for Scrabble players. But that only had words up to 15 letters long, so a few years ago some other word list, containing longer words, was merged into WordTwist's list. (I don't know where that other list came from.)

You can look up escribano in SOWPODS here. It shows that the word is in SOWPODS. According to the Wikipedia article on SOWPODS, one source for its British words is the Collins English Dictionary. You can look up escribano in that dictionary here, and find that it means "a clerk or scribe".


P.S.: What an amazing coincidence that JJBeanie and I posted replies within a minute of each other!

[JJBeanie]

Nylimb, and with such similar answers

[bwt1213]

I used to play Scrabble (and still do, but not on line), but when I began playing serious players many of them were determined to use the official Scrabble players' dictionary. The problem was twofold: I knew a whole lot of words that weren't in that dictionary BUT WERE STILL WORDS, and their dictionary had "words" that weren't in any dictionary but theirs. The official rules for Scrabble say, specifically, that any derived form is acceptable if it uses standard English rules. But if you play serious Scrabble games and use a derived word that is not specifically in the dictionary, it will be disallowed. So, I play and specify the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, two ten-pound volumes. That's what we use, AND derived forms. If I cared a whole lot about competitive Scrabble (hey, it's their game and they can make their rules for their tournaments), I'd be all up in arms over their dictionary. I like the one used here. It's not as picky, and if it's still not complete enough at least the people running this site care enough to update it from time to time. It would be nice if the Oxford Unabridged were the base, but you can't have everything.

[nmgyrl]

Thanks for the clarifications!