Nonwords in Scrabble.

Back in 2011 I wrote “I don’t play Scrabble much any more, though I’ve always enjoyed it (very amateurishly), so my reaction to the expansion of official vocabulary is muted,” and I don’t think I’ve played it since then, but I admit I’m taken aback by the new expansion described by Stefan Fatsis for Slate:

The linguistic tumult began in September, when NASPA Games, the organization that maintains the word list used in club and tournament Scrabble, published a draft of its update. The NASPA list includes all of the words in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, the go-to source for living-room and app players in North America, plus a lot more. Although the seventh edition of the OSPD, which I wrote about last year, ushered in more than 500 newbies, NASPA added more than 4,700. […]

When players, including me, started combing the list of additions of words up to 15 letters long—the OSPD stops at eight—they found a bunch of head-scratching stuff, mostly involving the inflected forms of words, with the plural endings -s and -es and the comparative and superlative endings -er, -est, -ier, and -iest.

Inflections can be tricky. Dictionaries have rarely listed every inflected form of root words—in the print age, for reasons of space and expense; now, online, because of convention. So [NASPA chief executive John] Chew and his colleagues on NASPA’s dictionary committee did what Scrabble players have done since the first OSPD was published by Merriam-Webster Inc. 45 years ago: They tried to apply rules enumerated by dictionaries to guide decisions on the validity of a word.

That’s a sensible approach, and NASPA spent hundreds of hours working on the update; a report to players cites numerous dictionary sources and drops authoritative-sounding terms like cutback plural and suffixal identity. Chew, thanks in part to his Scrabble work, was recently named editor of a planned dictionary of Canadian English. But he’s not a professional lexicographer, and NASPA didn’t consult any lexicographers to vet its list. As a result, pro lexicographers told me, the group committed errors in assumption and interpretation about dictionary practices, with some lexically comical results.

Take ROUXES, which NASPA added as a plural of the French-derived cooking agent roux. While Merriam-Webster and four other Scrabble source dictionaries explicitly state that the plural of roux is roux, the fourth edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, published in 1999, does not specify a plural.* Chew told me that dictionary’s front-matter rule regarding plurals of words ending in -s, -x, -z, and -sh is “extremely systematic” and calls for an -es ending when no plural is specified, which “unambiguously supports ROUXES.”

Steve Kleinedler, the managing editor of the fifth edition of Webster’s New World (2014), said NASPA’s interpretation is incorrect. […]

Or consider FECESES. According to NASPA, it was added because the second edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2005) doesn’t list a plural for feces, even though numerous other dictionaries specify, and common sense confirms, that feces is a plural noun. In his email, Chew said that when there is doubt about implied inflections, “we look for credible published citations to support them.” In a database for members, NASPA lists three citations for FECESES: a story in Fox News (the only Google hit I found from mainstream media), a passage in a textbook about Japanese marine life, and a 1934 article in a magazine about fox and fur ranching.

There are more examples, including HORSEFEATHERSES; as I wrote a decade ago in another context: “For some reason I am reminded of Google’s decision to ignore the metadata carefully built up by libraries over many years and create their own version from scratch for Google Books, which is a great deal less useful as a result.”

Comments

  1. (I’m ignoring the whole section on “slurs,” because I doubt if there’s anything interesting to be said on the subject.)

  2. Pocketses is 17 points. Was Gollum on the NASPA committee?

  3. British Scrabble’s publisher-approved official dictionary used to be Chambers, and though it’s now Collins, competitive British Scrabble grandfathers in all the Chambers words, including many Scottish ones and also CH, based (dubiously IMO) on this entry:

    ch, ch, pron. obs. S.W. and conventional dialect for ich, I, fused with the verb, as cham, I am, chave, I have, chill, I will.

  4. I share your dubiosity.

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    “Pocketses” is totally a word, Precious.

  6. My go-to source for two-ers is Stephin Merritt’s and Roz Chast’s 101 Two-Letter Words, each word illustrated with a ditty by the former and a cartoon by the latter. For “na” the cartoon shows a very irritated Scotsman in full Highland dress, saying, “This is na a skirt! And this is na a purse!! And these are na knee socks!!”

  7. J.W. Brewer says

    Isn’t “feces” a mass noun? Some googling reveals dictionaries that contend it’s a plurale tantum like “scissors” and ought to be treated as plural for verb agreement,* but … these dictionaries are describing some variety of English which seems not to be the one I speak and write.

    *Apparently in former times when Anglophones were all classically educated and treated “faeces” as a transparent Latin 3d-declension plural they were also familiar with the Latin singular (“faex”). But those days are long gone.

  8. Maybe “feceses”, like “fishes”, refers to varieties, for those who discern.

  9. On the subject of two-letter words I previously concluded that:

    The only two-letter words that have a venerable history in English and are neither clippings, nor… alternate spellings, nor function words are go (which is borderline on the function word question) and ox.

  10. Maybe “feceses”, like “fishes”, refers to varieties, for those who discern

    If you don’t know “feceses”, you don’t know shit

  11. two-letter words … nor function words

    Function words aren’t allowed in Scrabble? Because … ? am, we, is, at, it ? Are there words — of any length — that serve no function at all? ew! in vs on seems to me to carry a contentful distinction/that seems a very difficult categorisation to try to make.

    Re NASPA, I can hear my aunt — a huge Scrabble fan — restless in her grave.

  12. Maybe “feceses”, like “fishes”, refers to varieties, for those who discern

    If you don’t know “feceses”, you don’t know shit

    The only two-letter words that have a venerable history in English…

    wikipedia Three-letter rule

  13. “But he’s not a professional lexicographer, and NASPA didn’t consult any lexicographers to vet its list. As a result, pro lexicographers told me, the group committed errors in assumption and interpretation about dictionary practices, with some lexically comical results.”

    The author here makes an error in assumption and interpreation about what “lexicographers” told him.
    Steve Kleinedler’s quote:

    That particular rule about plurals, he explained, is intended for words that end in the sibilant sounds of the letters—like box or tax—not for French-derived words in which the x is silent. “They’re reading way too much in the front matter of a collegiate dictionary that is simplifying broadly so that it’s not bogged down in describing a handful of edge cases,” Kleinedler emailed. “I don’t think this (mis)reading of Webster’s New World should be taken as a basis for adding words.”

    I intrepret this as “the dictionary is bulshitting you and I, Steve Kleinedler, also keep bulshitting you”, and the “error” in interpretation of “practices” is that you simply should not trust dictionaries.

    …calls for an -es ending when no plural is specified, which “unambiguously supports ROUXES.”

    It does unambiguously support ROUXES. The error here is the absence of the plural form in the entry.
    The rule does not “simplify” anything at all.

    And I don’t like how the author presents a lexicographer’s error as the reader’s error.

  14. I should confess that the ellipses in my self-quote above removed a slight error in my original statement. Some of the two-letter respellings found in English (in particular “em’ and “en”) are actually respellings of one-letter words (“M” and “N”), thus lengthenings rather than shortenings.

  15. It does unambiguously support ROUXES. The error here is the absence of the plural form in the entry.

    What plural form? Roux is a mass noun in English. The omission in m-w.com of a plural form of fun does not mean that the plural is funs, it means there is no plural. The same applies to other mass nouns like slang, pay, luck, police, sweat, etc.

  16. Stu Clayton says

    A list of about 70 English words with no plural. There is no claim that the list contains all such words.

    A list of 100 English pluralia tantum. There is no claim that the list contains all such words.

    Wiktionary pages purported to contain thousands of “English nouns that are mostly or exclusively used in the plural form”. About 80 of them are styrofoam packing peanuts, such as “1730s” and “7-day measles”. Among the rest, I see many silicone implants such as “Assassins of Alamut” and “ass cheeks”.

  17. Dianne Dusman says

    If the plural of roux is “rouxes”, Is the plural of eaux “eauxes”. Hmmmm.

  18. Stu Clayton says

    “By the eauxes of Babylon …” It has something.

  19. Roses need eauxes to growses!

  20. When I play the New York Times Spelling Bee
    I’m often surprised by words they do and do not have on their list.

  21. Roux is a mass noun in English.

    It can be, but one of the most common phrases the word occurs in is “Make a roux.”

  22. Vegetarian ethics: make roux, not jus.

  23. Is “rouxes” pronounced the same as “ruses”?

  24. Once at a party I was in conversation with someone telling an anecdote and said, “There was a–Oh, what’s the singular of feces?” As this person wouldn’t have sad “turd” to save his life, I immediately answered, “Fex!”

  25. Is “rouxes” pronounced the same as “ruses”?

    I would. Of course the vowels in roux and ruse are esteem-threateningly different.

  26. Not for me: they’re both “oo.”

  27. You don’t have a French dancing mistress on your case. Speaking with her I must keep my French pronunciation en pointe.

  28. Roses need eauxes to growses!

    Eauxes make calfses be oxes.

  29. Maybe “feceses”, like “fishes”, refers to varieties, for those who discern.
    Looking at water quality nowadays, probably more people swim with the feceses than with the fishes…

  30. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    A local extreme in obnoxiousness: faexeses

    I’m clearly a Johnny-come-lately, never having been instructed in the learnèd singular and when to use it, nor indeed in a state of having removed my thumb from my arse for a time sufficient to look it up.

  31. The Three Foxes
    by A. A. Milne

    Once upon a time there were three little foxes
    Who didn’t wear stockings, and they didn’t wear sockses,
    But they all had handkerchiefs to blow their noses,
    And they kept their handkerchiefs in cardboard boxes.

    They lived in the forest in three little houses,
    And they didn’t wear coats, and they didn’t wear trousies.
    They ran through the woods on their little bare tootsies,
    And they played ‘Touch last’ with a family of mouses.

    They didn’t go shopping in the High Street shopses,
    But caught what they wanted in the woods and copses.
    They all went fishing, and they caught three wormses,
    They went out hunting, and they caught three wopses.

    They went to a Fair, and they all won prizes—
    Three plum-puddingses and three mince-pieses.
    They rode on elephants and swang on swingses,
    And hit three coco-nuts at coco-nut shieses.

    That’s all that I know of the three little foxes
    Who kept their handkerchiefs in cardboard boxes.
    They lived in the forest in three little houses,
    But they didn’t wear coats and they didn’t wear trousies,
    And they didn’t wear stockings and they didn’t wear sockses.

  32. David Marjanović says

    The only two-letter words that have a venerable history in English and are neither clippings, nor… alternate spellings, nor function words are go (which is borderline on the function word question) and ox.

    …and indeed ax, which is standard in the US (elsewhere axe), seems to look wrong to a lot of Americans.

  33. Ta.

  34. I never knew what wopses were until much later (OE wæps).

  35. Allan from Iowa says

    Maybe “feceses”, like “fishes”, refers to varieties, for those who discern.

    As a preteen I had a discerning friend who began an illustrated typology of… well, he certainly didn’t say feceses.

  36. personally, i must insist that -x properly pluralizes to -xen, as in oxen, boxen, rouxen, and axen.

  37. ixnay!

  38. A few years ago I wrote about Scrabble and about my own family experiences with it
    https://bruck.translation.org.il/the-games-we-play-with-words/

Speak Your Mind

*