The Letterpress 1.2 dictionary

Here’s a quick analysis of the Letterpress dictionary as of update 1.2.

The Letterpress dictionary is very close to a combination of the CSW12 International Scrabble dictionary plus the ENABLE2K word list. I can’t find an official home page for the latter but here’s a description and link for downloading: http://www.morewords.com/help/.

To these two lists the Letterpress 1.2 dictionary adds the following 137 words: https://gist.github.com/4335238
and deletes the following 141 words: https://gist.github.com/4335247

No word list will please everyone, but the combination of CSW12 and ENABLE2K makes a lot of sense. CSW12 does not include words longer than 15 letters, and although it includes many words that almost nobody has ever heard of it also omits a lot of relatively common words. The ENABLE2K list fills in a lot of the gaps in CSW12, but omits a lot of those peculiar words that Scrabble players have wasted so many hours memorizing. Unlike many of the word lists you can find floating around, both of these lists have been extensively reviewed and edited, so this is an excellent start for an inclusive word list for games like Letterpress.

There are, by the way, two words in the Letterpress dictionary with exactly 25 letters, PHOSPHATIDYLETHANOLAMINES and IMMUNOELECTROPHORETICALLY, so in theory it’s possible to smurf the board on the very first move. Your opponent might suspect you of cheating, however.

Comparing the Letterpress and Scrabble dictionaries

The Letterpress dictionary is similar to the CSW12 International Scrabble dictionary. I think that it would be simpler if Letterpress used CSW12 unmodified, but it doesn’t, so here’s a summary of the differences I could find.

By the way, if you’re a Scrabble player and have only used the North American Scrabble dictionary, there are a number of useful CSW12 words that you might not be familiar with. New Q-without-U words include QIN(-S) and FIQH(-S). I’ve found ZEX(-ES) useful a number of times in endgames, and lost recently because I didn’t know WEX(-E,-ED,-ES,-ING). The link above points out some more differences.

As of Letterpress version 1.1 there are only 39 words that are in CSW12 but not accepted by Letterpress. These include BROKED, CHINESE, GOOGLEWHACK(-S), NEXTS, SURFBOARDINGS, and also some words that were presumably removed because someone found them offensive, such as all variants of the word FAG. Plenty of other potentially offensive words are still included, however, so this partial bowdlerization seems odd.

There are 1,669 words accepted by Letterpress that are not accepted by CSW12. Some like CHRISTIANIZE and EUROPEANIZE are usually capitalized as far as I know. Others like HAJJS are unusual spellings of words already in CSW12, which has HAJJ(-AH,-AHS,-ES,-I,-IS). I couldn’t find any definition or usage of LAZYS, except as the name of an Australian band, or of UIT except as an acronym. Isn’t OCCURENCE just a common misspelling? Is OVERWRITED a real word? RILLY? Others seem to be the names of people and companies, including LOREN and ATEBITS but quite a few others as well. Even a few twitter handles.

Only a handful of the non-Scrabble words look useful enough to be worth remembering. I’ve found KEV and ZEN useful occasionally. I’ve played SHART(-S,-ER,-ES,-ING) once or twice, and had it played against me more than that.

Here are the words allowed in CSW12 Scrabble but not Letterpress 1.1: https://gist.github.com/4145944

And here are the words allowed in Letterpress 1.1 but not CSW12 Scrabble:
https://gist.github.com/4145939

As Ivo points out in the comments, a lot of those differences are due to the inclusion of words too long to play on the 15×15 Scrabble board. I’m not sure why, but there is separate a list of 10 to 15 letter words not included in CSW12 but nevertheless valid Scrabble words, and those, along with bunch of words that were deleted from the Scrabble dictionary, are all included in Letterpress. Here’s a list that’s closer to the idiosyncratic words in Letterpress, from ADJUSTORING to ZENIST:
https://gist.github.com/4150281