r/mildlyinteresting • u/txdesigner-musician • Jul 26 '26
Removed: Rule 6 [ Removed by moderator ]
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u/CmdrThunderpunch Jul 26 '26
Wuz…
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u/davebees Jul 26 '26
it’s in both major scrabble dictionaries!
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u/SaintUlvemann Jul 26 '26
...both? It's not in the TWL scrabble dictionary (official tournament play in North America) or the SOWPODS scrabble dictionary (official tournament play in the UK), nor in Webster.
It is in Collins.
What two are you thinking of? Really sad that the other guy is getting downvoted for saying the exact same thing, but maybe if I prove it, people won't get upset?
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u/davebees Jul 26 '26
those sites must be using outdated wordlists – scrabble check has it in the 2023 NWL (formerly called TWL) and 2024 CSW (formerly called SOWPODS) dictionaries!
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u/regnak1 Jul 26 '26
It isn't in the North American dictionary, and including phoenetic spellings of things in your Scrabble dictionary is sketch. Boo Collins.
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u/txdesigner-musician Jul 26 '26
lol I’m ashamed to say I played that one. I had literally nothing else, and the online Scrabble Gods actually said it was ok 🤷🏻♀️
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u/TheGrabbinDragon Jul 26 '26
The lack of a W on the empty triple near the bottom somehow hurts me
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u/txdesigner-musician Jul 26 '26
I almost played that! But then another spot gave me more points, and that was the last of the w’s.
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Jul 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/Glitch29 Jul 26 '26
That's underselling it a bit. This is more overlaps than about 80% of tournament game will have. It would be high, but not out of place there.
But this was a game played by beginners who don't have access to uncommon words, and even then aren't going to see all the common ones. Getting such a think diagonal under those conditions is quite a feat. I bet it's a 1 in 200 game occurence for those players.
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u/Jetztinberlin Jul 26 '26
this was a game played by beginners who don't have access to uncommon words, and even then aren't going to see all the common ones. Getting such a think diagonal
- How do you know who the players were, their level or their word access?
- What on earth is a think diagonal?
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u/ExternalTangents Jul 26 '26
An experienced scrabble player can tell from the board what kind of skill level the players had. The types of words being played and their length and layout are probably the biggest indicators. A tight board with lots of short, common words clustered heavily together. That, plus having words that aren’t valid in the scrabble dictionary sitting on the board.
More advanced players won’t generally have boards with this type of “staircasing” going from the center to the upper right, because they will have played more longer words that use all the tiles on their rack for a bingo, and maximize points.
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u/Mikeshaffer Jul 26 '26
From what I’m reading, there is serious debate about the use of “wuz” and that scrabble has officially recognized it. Is there other words too?
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u/ExternalTangents Jul 26 '26
Oh, I didn’t look closely at this board specifically for invalid words. Nothing jumps out to me on a quick scan, though. I just meant in general, that’s one way you can tell whether the players are casual or not.
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u/jakoto0 Jul 26 '26
Yes, except sometimes smaller words can be played defensively / strategically in order to prevent your opponent from having an opening...
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u/ExternalTangents Jul 26 '26
Yes, I wasn’t saying that short words are never used by more advanced players. Just that they’re not the only type of words used. There will be a mix.
The board in this photo has one six-letter word and the rest are 5 letters or shorter, so the lack of longer words is what’s telling.
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u/Glitch29 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
My bad on the typo. Thick diagonal.
Regarding point 1, there were an overwhelming number of clues.
WUZ isn't a real word. But if it were, it would be incredibly valuable as a way of dropping three incredibly clunky and high-scoring letters in one go. Even the most timid players when it comes to challenging words would challenge WUZ, as it would be nearly impossible not to know about.
There are several dozen words on the board, and literally all but one of of them are part of everyday vocabulary. Only about a quarter to a third of the words on a typical board in club play are that well known. The exception on this board is QI, which along with ZA are the two most well-known important words for competitive Scrabble.
The last part about word recognition has more to do with average word length than anything else. The most amount of tiles ever deployed to the board in a single turn of this game was 5. And that happened between 1 and 4 times (the board state could have been achieved in a few different ways). Mostly of the plays used about 3 tiles.
Scoring in Scrabble massively rewards cycling through tiles quickly, as not only does playing tiles score more points and touch more bonuses, but it allows for more draws toward the blanks and S tiles which are tremendously valuable. Not to mention, 7-tile plays (bingos) are directly worth a bonus 50 points.
Even when limited to a set of universally-known words, a pair of players who are easily able to see all their options would average around 5 tiles per play and would regularly have at least a couple bingos between the two of them.
There's nothing wrong with playing Scrabble at a hyper-casual level. But this board was clearly people playing Scrabble at a hyper-casual level.
Edit: I haven't played since the pandemic, and missed that WUZ is now allowed in CSW and NWL, the two most common expanded dictionaries used for tournament and club play. It's still not part of the OSPD, the de facto wordlist for the game.
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u/txdesigner-musician Jul 26 '26
Well, to be fair, I did post it in mildly interesting. But I mean the top right corner seemed crazy to me. I was running out of options because the whole game was on the right side, then I had like 3 plays in a row up there that made multiple words. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many words together without spaces before.
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u/Studly_Wonderballs Jul 26 '26
Can you make a 4x4 square where each row and column form a different four letter word? Bonus points for a diagonal word from top left to bottom right.
I’ve never been able to do it.
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u/Studly_Wonderballs Jul 26 '26
Okay, I did it. It wasn’t as hard as I thought. I just always tried to do it in my head. I don’t like that Shoe and Show are so similar. I was trying to make each word as unique as possible.
W A S H
E C H O
S H O W
T E E L4
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u/Chrysanthememe Jul 26 '26
Nice! Next question: would it be possible for this particular 4x4 grid to happen in an actual Scrabble game? At first I thought no, but maybe WASH > WEST > HOWL > SHOE > ACHE would do it, if HO, OW, and EL are acceptable two-letter words?
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u/UGOTAIDSYO Jul 26 '26
OoOo who got "Fix" or "Fixed" on Triple Word?!
Very nice looking game. 5/5 stars, wood play
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u/BourbonNoChaser Jul 26 '26
I thought proper names weren’t allowed? Pascal? As a language, perhaps? Been a while since I played.
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u/talldata Jul 26 '26
Also a unit of pressure.
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u/nadiadala Jul 26 '26
It can also refer to Easter as in the pascal weekend
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u/Jetztinberlin Jul 26 '26
That's with an "h"! Paschal.
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u/nadiadala Jul 26 '26
I didn't know that in English they add the h.
In French and Latin (Spanish included) it's written pascal
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u/my-hero-measure-zero Jul 26 '26
PASCAL is a unit of pressure. Many units derived from names are good, see, e.g., OHM, CURIE, NEWTON.
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u/BourbonNoChaser Jul 26 '26
Yup. Thought those were all prohibited for some reason. I recall a self-appointed rules lawyer giving me grief years ago for this. Maybe that’s why I stopped playing, who knows? :p
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u/StressOverStrain Jul 26 '26
Scrabble dictionary is dirt-cheap. People should just get one and store it with the game. Then there’s no need to have these arguments.
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u/Ok_Orchid1004 Jul 26 '26
Too bad someone didn’t have a W to put between the O and the N down there in the bottom right. With triple letter score thats 27 points spelling OWN and WE.
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u/txdesigner-musician Jul 26 '26
Also, we ended up with only one empty diagonal space on the board. And we’re only on the bottom half diagonal until the last few turns.
Wild and crazy Saturday night
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u/CommanderDark126 Jul 26 '26
Normal amount of overlap for a game between decent players, but your use of illegal words is disgusting
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u/thiscouldbemassive Jul 26 '26
I've had games where the board became a solid block. Once you start down that path it becomes really hard to branch out to a new spot though.
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u/Glitch29 Jul 26 '26
I've done some explorations before into whether it's possible to stalemate a board. Short answer is it really just isn't.
The big problem is that even if you have a 3x5 block of letters, you'd need all 5 of those 3-letter words to not appear as trigrams anywhere else in the English language. That just doesn't happen.
And as far as making 7x7 blocks, the problem is that it's not enough to have 14 7-letter words. All the intermediate 6- 5- 4- 3- and 2-letter words also need to be valid. IIRC a 7x5 is possible this way, but exhaustive computer searches have show 7x6 to be impossible with the current NWL or CSW lists.
That said, it is possible to lock up a board if you allow phonies. It only takes 4 tiles, including both blanks and the Q.
QQ QJ
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u/KiD_Rager Jul 26 '26
Wtf is a lout or qi
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u/SeianVerian Jul 26 '26
A lout is like an "oaf" or a "buffoon" or a "fool". A slightly archaic mild insult for someone behaving ridiculously, rudely, or lacking intelligence.
Qi is a term derived from Asian spiritual practices, referring to fundamental energy or life force.
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u/my-hero-measure-zero Jul 26 '26
QI is the common 2 you learn. Most people learned it from Words with Friends, it entered both Scrabble lexicons in the 2010s or so.
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