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On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

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Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#61

Post by jodrellblank »

greenbit wrote: post #52
jodrellblank wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://scrabblewordfinder.org/dictionary/parer Someone who reads is a reader , viewer, writer, dancer, God loves a tryer, and someone who pares should be a parer. Although I often try that pattern and have it denied, if you can shelve a project it suggests shelver which is in, if you can table a motion it suggests tabler which isn’t.

Wouldn't a tabler be a person who makes tables? =P

As much as a hooker is a person who makes hooks, and a carpenter is one who makes carpents =P

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#62

Post by ElfinTrousers »

paulcole wrote: post #55

> Once your brain is attuned to anagrams, you start seeing them everywhere. I had a moment like this when I was obsessed with Scrabble — studying and playing 20+ hours a week. I saw a guy at work with Demetrius on his nametag. Instantly I saw that “with another U you could make ‘deuteriums.’” It was the weirdest feeling because I had no idea where that realization came from. I lost probably 4 years in my 20s to Scrab…

"Deuterium" is uncountable, I'd challenge "deuteriums".

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#63

Post by ghaff »

groggo wrote: post #3

It would be interesting to have a "simple english" Scrabble dictionary, without QI and similar words. One reason Wordle is awesome is because they manually filtered down the possible 5 letter words.

One of the clever things about Wordle is a very well-calibrated difficulty level, at least for native English speakers. At least for non-hard mode (i.e. can play a word that you already know can't be the final answer) and using a good start word, it requires some luck to get the answer in less than four but you won't lose (i.e. more than six) very often. And it's usually pretty quick.

Thinking about whether something is a likely answer also introduces some strategy itself.

In spite of being something of a professional writer, I don't usually like word games (including Scrabble) much. But I do like Wordle--although I quickly tired of the multiple word variants.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#64

Post by glenjamin »

iopq wrote: post #28
jrumbut wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two letter words and the common q-without-u words are enough to unlock a much more entertaining version of the game than the one you can play with a normal vocabulary. Since you already know most of them you're only memorizing a few dozen very short words. Then a few vowel dumps wouldn't hurt, short V/X/K words...

Ah yes, real words like ae, al, de, ka, oe, xu, za

If you think those words are made up, wait until you hear about how we got all of the other ones.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#65

Post by ghaff »

iopq wrote: post #30
hackcasual wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a few that aren't exactly vernacular. I'm still angry about "parer"

That's a very logical word if you know what a paring knife is

It's a logical word (and, as I recall, I eventually went with it) in the sense of someone or something that pares. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/parer But it's fair to say that it's not especially common in the US. Someone would normally say they were going to the manicurist or ask you to hand them the paring knife--though, at least in the latter case, they might intuit the meaning from context.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#67

Post by paulcole »

ElfinTrousers wrote: post #62
paulcole wrote: post #55

> Once your brain is attuned to anagrams, you start seeing them everywhere. I had a moment like this when I was obsessed with Scrabble — studying and playing 20+ hours a week. I saw a guy at work with Demetrius on his nametag. Instantly I saw that “with another U you could make ‘deuteriums.’” It was the weirdest feeling because I had no idea where that realization came from. I lost probably 4 years in my 20s to Scrab…

"Deuterium" is uncountable, I'd challenge "deuteriums".

You would be wrong:

https://scrabble.merriam.com/finder/deuteriums

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#68

Post by dspillett »

groggo wrote: post #3

It would be interesting to have a "simple english" Scrabble dictionary, without QI and similar words. One reason Wordle is awesome is because they manually filtered down the possible 5 letter words.

When I was younger (I've not really played since) we played by a word being valid if you could state what it means and use it in a sentence. An Oxford English Dictionary was used to check. For domain specific words other references were permitted (books on computing for instance, or an encyclopedia). Acronyms were permitted only if in common use in that form. Local slang too, I supposed in modern times adding Urban Dictionary to the references would cover that.

But the important thing was to state the meaning before looking up the word, not just using the reference list to pick out combinations that work with your letters. It being a real word did not count if you didn't understand the word.

This wouldn't work as well for online gaming, I expect. And of course you can game it by memorising the meanings of some obscure words, but that (expanded vocab) was part of the point.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#69

Post by Someone »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #36

Been casually trying to increase my ELO on Wordfeud. When you know the dictionary by heart (Wordfeud has rather restricted dictionaries) and have the basics of bonus hunting and hooking down, Scrabble becomes a pure game of imperfect knowledge and strategy. The known information is the prior letter distribution, the played letters on the board and in your rack. The unknown information is your opponent's rack. However…

> However, you can compute exact letter probabilities for his rack and strategize accordingly.

I think the best programs run Monte Carlo simulations on the contents of their opponent’s rack. That includes modeling their opponent’s moves, and thus improves on just computing these probabilities.

As a simple example, if they played a move, but, if they had an ‘e’, could have made a much better move, chances are they didn’t have an ‘e’ when they made their last move, even if that, a priori, was still highly likely.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#70

Post by solardev »

kamilm wrote: post #45

I got Scrabble as a Christmas gift about 20 years ago and I immediately fell in love with it. Fast forward 20 years and now I have a Scrabble Solver app (open source) in my portfolio that I'm proud of. It still needs improvements to run nicely on mobile but I'm happy with how it runs on desktop. Maybe someone will find it useful, so I'm sharing here :) https://scrabble-solver.org https://github.com/kamilmielnik/scrab…

This is beautiful :) Thanks for sharing!
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