Wordtwist Dictionary Update

[Razorflame]

With this new update, would words like F**K and S**T still be in the dictionary or have those been removed?

[admin]

They never were in Wordtwist. Any board generated that included the possibility of forming hard vulgarity was always immediately discarded.

This means there are a handful of longer words - i.e. MISHITTING or SHITAKE - which will never show up on any game, even though they are technically allowed in our dictionary.

[admin]

How about yuns?

The main definition I can find for YUN or YUNS has it as a proper noun, which would not be allowed in Wordtwist:

Yun
noun
ˈyu̇n
plural Yun or Yuns
: a Laotian of the right bank of the Mekong distinguished by tattooing on the body rather than the legs and thighs

Source: Yun Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

I also see "yuns" as a user-submitted term in "Open Dictionary", with the definition of a highly informal shortening of "you all", as here:

YUNS (pronoun) American English definition and synonyms | Macmillan Dictionary

But informal/dialectical terms are also not included in the dictionary update.

YUNS is actually an excellent example of why I decided to exclude categories like archaic, dialectical, etc. - including them all would have absolutely exploded the number of allowed 3, 4, 5 and 6-letter words in Wordtwist, significantly changing the game. It almost got to the point where it felt like any halfway pronounceable combination of random letters would have had at least a 50-50 chance of being considered a word in some archaic usage or small pocket of human dialect somewhere in the world.

[dannyb]

Is it archaic if it is still used? Western Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio. Is that a small pocket of usage?. I guess that compared to the rest of the English speaking world it is. I'll concede on yuns.

I will never give up on nage though. It is a flavored poaching broth that can also be served as a "sauce".

[Naboka]

Is it correct to assume that the expanded dictionary stems more from inflectional and grammatical variations rather than adding new distinct lexemes?

Such as misbehaving and misbehaver might already exist but adding s produces the new words misbehavings and misbehavers. Adding the ness/nesses adds misbehavingness/misbehavingnesses.

As bwt1213 championed, many potential words were missing that followed normal inflectional forms or grammatical variation. Simple pluralization being one.
(and pluralization can convert a common word into an ultra rare one.)

As opposed to adding a bunch of terms like melanogaster or melanoglossia--just guessing they may not be included.

[admin]

Nage isn't in the dictionary we're using as our master, though I do see it in a few others. My best guess is that it is still considered to be a French word occasionally used in English, rather than a full-fledged borrowing from French. It's definitely an edge case, and if I were hand-selecting each word to be added I would probably include it. I just don't have the time to hand-sift through 1.5 million words and make these types of individual decisions.

Re: Naboka's comment... I specifically purchased a lexicographical database which cross-references all words by their roots. I did this so that I could find - and include - any word that is based off the same root. A good example is COUNTEROBJECTING, which was added in the 2019 update, but we didn't at that time include COUNTEROBJECT, COUNTEROBJECTS, or COUNTEROBJECTING. The new word database cross-references all of those as having the same root word, and therefore all of those words were now included in the 2022 update. This includes plurals/singulars, verb tenses, adverbial versions, etc. As with any dataset I don't expect it to be 100% perfect but so far I've found it to have caught almost all of the reported "missing" words posted on the forum in the past several years (at least those which weren't archaic/dialectical).

[dannyb]

[QUOTE=admin;n31151]Nage isn't in the dictionary we're using as our master, though I do see it in a few others. My best guess is that it is still considered to be a French word occasionally used in English, rather than a full-fledged borrowing from French. It's definitely an edge case, and if I were hand-selecting each word to be added I would probably include it. I just don't have the time to hand-sift through 1.5 million words and make these types of individual decisions.

Thanks for the explanation.

[lalatan]

This was intriguing. SUPERRESPONSIBLENESSES was accepted for 42 pts but SUPERRESPONSIBLENESS was not.

[admin]

This was intriguing. SUPERRESPONSIBLENESSES was accepted for 42 pts but SUPERRESPONSIBLENESS was not.

Thanks for catching that - puzzle is fixed and dictionary updated. I'll run some more checks to see if there are any similar cases that slipped through.

[lalatan]

Thanks for making the changes so quickly. That's superresponsible of you.

[admin]

80 similar words (-NESSES in the dictionary but -NESS not) were also found and fixed. Thanks again.

[bwt1213]

Tried "doler" and it's not accepted. Last Halloween, I was a doler of treats. Is there a reason this is not acceptable? If not, are there other similar words not accepted?

[bwt1213]

Tried "doler" and it's not accepted. Last Halloween, I was a doler of treats. Is there a reason this is not acceptable? If not, are there other similar words not accepted?

Let me anticipate: "holer". I will give an example: "He is a holer of long putts and a lipper of short ones." Another: "The new gun is a holer of battleships." I hate feeling that I am the only one pushing the boundaries, but if a word is a verb, then let it take on all the properties of a verb. Yep, "lip" just became a verb. Because that's how it's used.

[admin]

DOLER is not in any dictionary I can find, except rarely as a Spanish term. HOLER and LIPPER are both in our dictionary.

I suspect you'll find a lot of -ER verb-to-noun forms that feel like they are words but which aren't included in any standard dictionary. When it comes to the Wordtwist word-bank we can only go with what the lexicographers allow us.

[Brisul]

These new "Super Boards" can be a little deceiving with so many words on them because they are actually pretty difficult as far as scoring really high. But I think they may have actually helped me go from a 979 average about a week ago to the 1007 final average I ended up with to finish in 3rd place. Not bad!