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and Canada, and Mattel elsewhere), became a popular word list for game-makers developing their own Scrabble spinoffs, including, in 2009, a little game called Words With Friends.
#Word scrabble free#
ENABLE, free from the proprietary burdens imposed by Scrabble’s trademark holders (Hasbro in the U.S. And when an open-source alternative to the Scrabble dictionary called ENABLE (an acronym for Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon) was released in 1997, it too considered abbreviations verboten. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, first published in 1978, has followed those instructions to the letter. As Stefan Fatsis, the author of the book Word Freak about the competitive Scrabble world, has noted, when the game was first marketed in 1948, the rules were spelled out right inside the box: “Any words found in a standard dictionary are permitted except those capitalized, those designated as foreign words, abbreviations, and words requiring apostrophes or hyphens.” Doesn’t including these abbreviations go against the spirit of games like Words With Friends that have Scrabble burned into their DNA? (And no, Zynga isn’t making DNA playable, at least not yet.)Īs the granddaddy of word-tile board games, Scrabble has long made clear what does and doesn’t count as a playable word. While trendy initialisms might make for good marketing material, purists raised on Scrabble might balk at the additions. Emily in Paris Is the Last Guilty Pleasure Spencer Kornhaber