Some Scrabble® Resources Moved
The blurb "About Scrabble®" and various Word Lists
have migrated to the DC
Scrabble Club's website.
There is also the section on Sources and Study Tools
there.
But here are some of the key links:
Computer Games
Jason
Katz-Brown and John O'Laughlin
announced on 6 March 2006 "the public release of Quackle (www.quackle.org), a world-class
crossword game artificial intelligence and analysis tool. It can be
configured to play and analyze SCRABBLE® brand crossword games and use the
newest lexicons. Quackle includes a move generator, move evaluator,
simulator, and Qt-based user interface and can be used with any board
layout, alphabet, lexicon, and tile distribution. It is licensed under the
open-source revised BSD license." I.e. it is a free way to simulate best
play so you can analyze your game and find out what your weak points are.
The Internet Scrabble Club
allows you to play scrabble online (for free).
For a good reason to dislike the Facebook application, see
this
NPR piece which mentions a game I played against Stefan Fatsis.
Word Lookup
Zyzzyva and LeXpert are excellent tools for studying or looking up
words (NOTE: you don't want to use
Hasbro's site to look up words, since
it will fail to find inflections that are listed in the body of the definition, e.g. RANGY vs. RANGIEST).
Though Zyzzyva is still in the
earlier stages of development, it includes definitions, which is a boon to beginners (serious players
tend not to care at all about definitions). Carol Ravichandran's LeXpert program has been around for much longer, but
Carol Ravichandran announced Jan 28, 2007 11:25 AM that no future updates were likely.
Cheat Sheets
Rebecca Slivka of the Seattle Scrabble® Club has made a useful
pair of
cheat sheets (or one sheet in two parts: part 1
and part 2)
for learning the most important new words.
There are also two PDF files designed to be double-sided one-page cheat sheets for beginners here:
one with just 2- and 3-letter words and Q w/o QU words, and
one that adds 4- and 5-letter J, X, Q, and Z words.
Other Resources
OWL Errata
Note these corrections to the first edition of the recently published
Official Word List (aka OWL2, distinct from the OSPD in that it includes
bowdlerized words and excludes definitions),
posted by Jim Pate:
Additions:
page 98 CRABAPPLE
page 98 CRABAPPLES
page 118 DEVELOPPES
page 186 GODDAMNDEST
page 279 MUNCHABLES
page 485 VIREONINES
Deletions:
page 98 CRABABBLE
page 98 CRABABBLES
page 186 GODAMNDEST
page 491 WEAPONEERED
OSPD Errata
The Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary (most recent edition is the
Fourth, aka the OSPD4) is a lamentably inaccurate
document, and it excludes these
"expurgated" words which are acceptable in
tournament play (except when televised by ESPN).
Rebecca Slivka created
a
printable "errata" sheet for OSPD4 that includes
all new expurgated words, all words accidentally omitted from the OSPD4
printing, and enumerates the deletions.
If you combine that document with the OWL1
expurgated word list, found at Steven Alexander's
website, you should have all the differences between OSDP4 and OWL2.