Separated by a Common Language (Part 2)

A proposal to merge—gradually—Scrabble's North American and international word lists.

The 127 two-letter words on the international word list. Screenshot via Collins

To read Part 1, click here. Warning: This eventually gets very inside Scrabble.

When Scrabble went viral in America in the early 1950s, its international rights were acquired by a British toy company, J. W. Spear and Sons. When tournaments took off a couple of decades later, the game’s American owner at the time, Selchow & Righter, contracted with the American dictionary maker Merriam-Webster, which published the first edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary in 1978. Two years later, Spear followed suit. But instead of licensing the Merriam book, the OSPD, it went with a British publisher: Chambers.

It was a fateful decision. The Chambers Dictionary was a broader source than Merriam’s Collegiate and the four other U.S. dictionaries used to compile the OSPD. Chambers dates to 1867 and was a crowning achievement of the Scottish brothers, writers, and publishers William and Robert Chambers. The dictionary acquired a reputation as a literary but also quirky reference. Its entries could be playful in the tradition of 18th-century English lexicographer Samuel Johnson, who famously defined oats as “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” The lexicographers at Chambers defined éclair as “a cake, long in shape but short in duration,” and middle-aged as “between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner.”¹

For years, tournament Scrabble in England used only words from Chambers, published in list form as Official Scrabble Words, or OSW. For the first world championship, in 1991, words from both OSW and the American OSPD were permitted. The combined source was dubbed SOWPODS, a pronounceable mash-up of the two initialisms, and Chambers printed a book listing all of the acceptable words, without definitions. The goal was to create a single, global standard for the game.

Since there were few SOWPODS tourneys in North America, top players competing in the U.S. and Canada had to compartmentalize the differences between the lists to play in the biennial world championship or abroad, which the best players were able to do. (Nigel Richards of New Zealand has won 12 world and North American championships, plus titles in French and Spanish. No brain compartmentalizes like Nigel’s brain.) Over time, more and more Scrabble federations, including England’s, adopted SOWPODS as their official source. North America eventually was the only major holdout.²

The names of the lists changed over time but the primary distinction hasn’t: a lot more words overseas. As I mentioned in Part 1, the current international list is managed by the World English Language Scrabble Players Association, WESPA, under the auspices of the British dictionary publisher Collins. It includes around 86,000 more words than the two North American lists, one of them managed by NASPA Games and the other by another governing body, the Word Game Players’ Organization, or WGPO. The relevant hunk of difference is words two- through eight-letters long—around 31,000 in all.

What accounts for the excess? For starters, Chambers was just bigger than other desktop dictionaries. My 1998 edition contains more than 215,000 words, around 25 percent more than Merriam’s Collegiate. And many of those extra words were of the sort that you wouldn’t find in a contemporary, college-level lexicon. The cover of my Chambers touts the book as having

The preface elaborates:

One of the key associations of The Chambers Dictionary is with crossword puzzles and word games, where it is recognized as offering an especially wide range of vocabulary that is likely to meet the considerable demands that these pursuits impose on a dictionary. It is the official reference source for the board-game Scrabble, and is regularly used by crossword compilers as well as solvers.

More generally, it is famous for explaining words of the past in addition to words of the present. Its many admirers seek in it the rich range of information on literary and technical words of a kind that are often left out of dictionaries on grounds of currency; here will be found the language of Shakespeare and Spenser and of the Bible and Burns and Scott, many local and dialect words, and words in other varieties of English, alongside the latest terminology of the age of the microprocessor.

Some of the varieties mentioned include English words from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. If you love words—and the breadth of global English—how can you not love DIKKOP,³ a South African bird; and KINGKLIP, a South African fish; and GOBURRA, an alternate spelling of KOOKABURRA, the Aussie bird. IWI is a Maori tribe. MPRET is a old title for an Albanian ruler. MOZ is Australian slang meaning “a curse or jinx.” Then there’s the French borrowing for “the faking of works of art,” TRUCAGE, spelled even more pleasingly TRUQUAGE. And the Arabic borrowing MUQADDAM, also spelled MOKADDAM and MOCUDDUM, “a leader, a headman” in India. And WOWF, a Scots word for crazy. The last entry in my Chambers is ZYTHUM, defined as “a kind of beer made by the ancient Egyptians, highly commended by Diodorus Siculus, a writer of the first century BC.” Diodorus Siculus totally would have had a #beertiktok.

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The complaints about Chambers/Collins generally are about archaisms and regional dialectalisms, especially from Scotland, of which there are plenty. There’s a reason that the “range” of contemporary desktop dictionaries wasn’t as “rich” as Chambers’—because out-of-date words were omitted to keep the size of the books manageable and to help people answer current questions about language. So while Chambers celebrated its heft as a source for games, a modern game didn’t and doesn’t require words used by and only by, say, John Milton.

QUAT, for instance, while handy for Scrabble, certainly wouldn’t make the cut in a college dictionary. It’s defined in Chambers as “a pimple (now dialect); an insignificant person (Shakesp.) [Origin unknown].” I checked the Oxford English Dictionary and that dialect is “The South-West Midland Dialect as Spoken in Herefordshire and Its Environs.” YWROKE and WROKE are Spenserian spellings of wreak; Edmund Spenser breathed his last breath in 1599. WRATE is an “Obsolete and Scot” past tense of write. WRAST is “Obsolete Northern form of wrest directly from Old Norse.” Bruh, we’re playing Scrabble, not taking a grad-level linguistics seminar.

Or consider the two-letter words pictured up top. There are 127 of them. That’s 20 more than on the word lists over here. You can definitely eye-roll⁴ at a few of the North American twos—especially AL (“an East Indian tree”)⁵ —but, after looking at their dictionary entries and histories, I’d say more than half of the Collins-only twos are sus by the standards of a contemporary dictionary. In fact, you won’t find 13 of them—CH, DI, EA, FY, GU, KO, KY, NY, OB, ST, UG, UR, and YU—in either Collins’ or Chambers’ online dictionaries.

But the 20 words were in the physical Chambers Dictionary, so they were included in the international Scrabble word list. CH—the only acceptable two-letter word containing a C—is defined in Chambers as “(obs) pronoun SW English dialect for ich I, fused with the verb, as cham I am, chave I have, chill I will.” NY is “an obsolete spelling of nigh.” (Not to be confused with NYS, “(Spenser) is not. [ne and is].”) The most recent usage example for ny in the OED is from 1517. OB is defined as “an objection,” with a note explaining that it comes “From the marginal note ob in old books of controversial divinity.” The OED says it’s “Now historical.” UG looks reasonable, maybe an alternate spelling of ugh? It’s defined as “to arouse loathing in” and labeled obsolete. The most recent OED example: 1894.

The question isn’t whether these and so many more are valid words. They are. Lexicographers at Chambers determined that they met the criteria for inclusion in that particular dictionary at that particular time. The question is whether that lexicon was the right one for a 20th- and now 21st-century word game. “When I started using Chambers, it had so many words that were really *just* Scrabble words that it did make the game feel more like it had an arbitrary word list—lots of things to memorise⁶ just because they’re there, not because they’re English words in any meaningful contemporary sense,” Lynne Murphy, a linguistics professor at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, who writes a blog with the same title as these posts and is a tournament Scrabble player, wrote in an email.

You almost certainly wouldn’t pick Chambers today—it’s hard enough to explain competitive Scrabble to onlookers flummoxed by the preponderance of unusual words on any tournament board without also having to explain why words last used during the Renaissance are acceptable. But a bunch of U.K. Scrabblers almost 50 years ago did pick Chambers, and collected all of the words in it that met Scrabble’s playability guidelines. Murphy, who is American and has lived in England for more than two decades, noted that the Chambers list seemed suited to the playing style in England at the time, in which players cooperated to achieve the highest possible score. “All the competitive, shutting-people-out strategy seemed too American to some,” she said.

But even if you believe Chambers/Collins is a flawed lexicon for Scrabble, the idea of world Scrabble starting over with a different one just won’t fly. Too many years have passed, too many words are entrenched in the game. Plus, as I noted in Part 1, the Scrabble’s growth is in countries not named England or the United States—including some where English isn’t the primary spoken language and where an individual word’s etymological history might be of even less concern than it already is to most players in North America. The truth is that when weird-looking strings of letters are added to dictionaries and then Scrabble, a minority of players grumbles for a while and then gladly plays them on the board.

In any case, it’s important to note that word rejection has been a one-way street. When NASPA updates the North American list every few years, WESPA typically adds the new words; there’s no complaining that they are “too American.” It’s the North American Scrabble orgs that have refused to take in words from their global counterpart.⁷

So what’s to be done? Here’s my modest proposal.

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For starters, North America needs to have one word list. As I wrote in Part 1, and in Slate in 2023, and in a post here in March, the main North American governing body, NASPA Games, has in recent years deviated from Scrabble’s historical practice of vetting its list with Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers. As a result, NASPA has added scores of lexically dubious words, largely inflections—the plural endings -s and -es and the comparative and superlative endings -er, -est, -ier, and -iest. The other North American group, WGPO, has piggybacked for its own lexicon off of NASPA’s list—which itself piggybacked off of work dating to 1978. (I’ve written about whether Scrabble lists are copyrightable.) WGPO correctly refused to add many of the contested inflections, like FECESES and MIREPOIXS, to name just two. But it also refused, in a vote of membership, to follow NASPA’s sensible decision a few years ago to make dozens of slurs ineligible. So we have two groups overseeing the same game in the same countries applying two sets of rules (the words being the rules). 🤦‍♂️

The compromise is obvious. WGPO should delete the slurs. Scrabble doesn’t need them, full stop, but especially as the tournament scene looks to grow through online play, livestreaming, and social media. And NASPA should acknowledge that its recent work is open to question, ask Merriam to vet the additions, and delete whatever comes up short. If Merriam isn’t interested—it no longer oversees the NASPA tournament list, just publishes new editions of the OSPD⁸—NASPA can hire a freelancer to do the work; as the dictionary business shrinks, thanks to Google and AI, plenty of lexicographers are available for hire. This isn’t about purging valid words because they’re obsolete. It’s about removing words that have never been validated by a dictionary and don’t have sufficient backing through actual usage. Their inclusion undermines the credibility of the game.

Remedying an organizational divide grounded in philosophical differences and years-long personal disagreements is complicated. But a single North American word list would give all players competitive clarity and lay the ground for the harder work of organizational unification. It also would smooth the path toward resolving the global lexicon rift. To reiterate, there are just too many words exclusive to Collins to add them all to North American Scrabble in one shot. Doing so would understandably alienate scores of players. I wouldn’t like it myself. Instead, let’s do this:

Add around 1,000 words up to eight letters long every year for five years.

That’s not much more than the usual periodic lexicon update—NASPA’s most recent one, in 2023, pumped in more than 700 words of those lengths. Players already choose which new words to learn and which to ignore. This would be no different. If 1,000 seems like too many, or five years too fast, adjust accordingly. The point is to enact a reasonable, methodical way of building up the North American lexicon. “You want to make the process quick enough so it doesn’t feel like 20 more years of two dictionaries,” Top-10 North American player Jackson Smylie told me. “But you also want to make updates small enough each year so it’s not too noticeable.”

Any annual update would be more frequent than the usual five to seven years. Some players would feel overwhelmed. But the vast majority of tournament Scrabblers don’t learn every word anyway—not even close—and some subset of players will complain no matter how many or how few words are added. Lexical purists won’t like it, nor will those who are adamantly opposed to crossing over. I get the concerns. I really do. But Scrabble’s leadership should shut out the noise and focus on what’s best for the greater good and future of the game.

So, next decision: Which 5,000 words in five years do you add? Scrabble players typically learn words by length and utility. The goal is to learn words that are most likely to show up most frequently. That means the short words, two through five letters long (only super-experts learn the sixes, which aren’t as strategically essential for the vast majority), and the most highly likely seven- and eight-letter “bingos.”

Here are the number of Collins-only words by those lengths:

2 letters: 20
3 letters: 266
4 letters: 1,416
5 letters: 3,546
7 letters: 9,047
8 letters: 10,615

That’s almost 25,000 words, which far exceeds our 1,000 a year. So we have to prioritize. Essential goal: Add all of the Collins-only two-, three-, and four-letter words by the end of the five years. There are 1,702 of those. That works out to around 340 words a year—four two-letter words plus around 50 three-letter words and 280 four-letter words. For intermediate- to expert-rated players, those are manageable numbers. We’ll then need to add around 660 five-, seven-, and eight-letter words per year, for a total of around 3,300.⁹

Which specific words should be added in each serving? Scrabble study programs can list words in order of what’s known as playability, which measures the value of knowing a particular word relative to other words. Playability is a better metric for this exercise than its cousin probability because it’s based on utility rather than just the odds that a word will show up on a rack. In layman’s terms, playability ranks words according to how useful they are to know.

Let’s consider the five-letter words. Seth Lipkin, a top North American-list player, software engineer, and creator of the Scrabble resource site Cross-Tables, explained on LiveJournal way back in 2007 that the most playable fives contain: multiple vowels; the high-value J, Q, X, and Z; and the four- and five-point letters F, H, K, V, W, and Y. “You will find few of the highest-probability words because playing, say, RATES is very often the wrong play!” Lipkin wrote. “As you move to bingo-length words, the high-probability words leap in.”

I had the NASPA study program Zyzzyva, written by another expert player, Michael Thelen, list the Collins-only fives according to playability. At the top of the list is the vowel-heavy RAINE, one of those Spenser words, meaning reign. A little further down, comes NGAIO, a New Zealand tree. The middle of list includes the South African exclamations JINNE and JIRRE. And, finally, way down are unlikely-to-play words like SUKUK, “a financial certificate that conforms to Muslim strictures on the charging or paying of interest,” per Collins, and ZHUZH, also spelled ZHOOSH, meaning “to make more exciting, lively, or attractive [usually with up].” Collins labels ZHUZH “American English,” but it’s not playable over here. Dictionaries!

Playability is a good metric for determining which Collins words would be instantly useful. (The most-playable Collins-only sevens are all vowel-heavy: NOTAIRE, a French notary, and its anagram, OTARINE, an adjective for a seal with ears, and ETAERIO, “aggregate fruit.”) We can use playability for all of the words three- to eight-letters long. If we distribute our 660 five-, seven-, and eight-letter words evenly, that means adding 220 of each per year. Again, manageable for serious players.

Another possible move: Eliminate confusing or seemingly nonsensical differences among the lexicons. The 2017 North American champ and Scrabble content creator Will Anderson, whose YouTube channel has more than 70,000 subscribers, keeps lists of words “that will make you go insane keeping the lists straight” and words “that are shockingly not in NWL,” the name of NASPA’s list. A few crazy-making differences: NORTHMOST and WESTMOST are acceptable in both lexicons but EASTMOST and SOUTHMOST are Collins-only. QUAD-, QUINT-, SEXT-, SEPT-, and OCTUPLET are all good but NONUPLET is just Collins. A few of Will’s how-are-those-not-playable-in-North-America words: AVOIDANT, DEPARTER, EXPIRANT, HEADLIKE, HINDFEET, REOPENER, SCUTTLER, and perhaps most surprising, VIRALITY. To which I’d add EYEROLL (see footnote 3). You also could standardize -ER and -ISE/-IZE endings, which also deviate.

To do the difficult and thankless work of identifying which words of each length would be added each year, we’ll convene a panel of players with experience editing the North American and Collins lists. But allow me to make my own suggestion for the two-letter words, which are the building blocks of Scrabble and the easiest to learn. Here are the Collins 20, with definitions I cobbled together from Chambers and online lists:

CH obsolete pronoun for I
DI plural of DEUS, god
EA (dialect) a river, a drainage channel in the Fens
EE (Scots) eye
FY an interjection expressing reproach
GU a kind of viol formerly used in Shetland
IO an interjection expressing joy, triumph, grief; (noun) a cry of ‘Io’
JA (South Africa) yes
KO (Maori) a digging-stick
KY (Scots) cattle
NY an obsolete spelling of NIGH
OB an objection (in the phrase ob and sol)
OO (Scots) wool; (Scots) we
OU (Scots) an interjection expressing concession; (South Africa) a bloke
ST an interjection requesting silence; a sound made to attract someone’s attention
UG (obsolete or dialect) to dread, loathe
UR an interjection expressing hesitation
YU (Chinese) a precious jade
ZE a gender-neutral pronoun
ZO a Tibetan breed of cattle

Two zos. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Learning these twos would be simple for most players. But adding all 20 to the 107 now playable in North America would instantly, dramatically, and chaotically reorient the game’s strategy. That’s why we’re going to take it slow and sprinkle in the two-letter words gradually, too. I broke them into five categories: Power Twos (JA, KO, KY, ZE, ZO), Vowel Twos (EA, EE, IO, OO, OU), U Twos (GU, UG, UR, YU), Consonant Twos (CH, FY, NY, ST), and Normal-Looking Twos (DI, OB). Then I created an entry order, mixing categories to spread out the strategic change over time.

Year 1: DI, IO, KO, ZE¹⁰
Year 2: EA, FY, JA, UG
Year 3: OB, OO, GU, ZO
Year 4: EE, NY, OU, UR
Year 5: KY, ST, YU

Wait, you say, that’s only 19 words. That’s because we’re going to remove CH from the word list. In addition to its lexical obsolescence, CH is the only two-letter word in Scrabble with a C. There’s a sanctity to—and board-closing defensive power in—the absence of twoness¹¹ for the C (and the V). “Removing the stupidest two-letter word and that weird amount of variance in putting C’s in places, that would be fine. That would be amazing,” said Josh Sokol, who switched to Collins after winning the 2023 North American championship. Will Anderson, who also plays Collins, said: “I would love there to be a little bit of expurgation to get the most egregious crap out of there, and CH is right in there for me.”¹²

I’d ask our panel to identify some of the egregious crap. You could restrict deletions to the old-timey words—your Spenser, your Shakespeare—and invite a lexicographer with relevant expertise to help. However many words that turns out to be, it makes sense to purge the game’s most anachronistic extremes, regardless of the unlearning it would require. Bottom line, removing a set of Collins words would be a small, good-faith gesture to players in North America.

A merger of North American and trans-Atlantic and -Pacific Scrabble would necessitate lots more decisions, including what to do about differing rules for challenging plays.¹³ But five years would allow organizers to address ancillary issues and give players time to assimilate the most important words. Anyone who wanted to cross over earlier could play in Collins divisions; North American divisions would still be there, just with the slowly updated list. After the five years, dump in the rest of the Collins words. At that point, most players will have the basics down, the short words and most-useful bingos. Studying beyond that is largely the province of experts and aspiring ones.

This proposal won’t satisfy everyone. Heels will be dug in, as they have for decades. Some players will insist that any mandated move is unfair and would trigger a mass exodus from the game. And there certainly would be a call for one of the existing organizations, or a new one, to offer divisions that stick to the current lists. After all, American exceptionalism is a powerful drug.

But let’s be honest: The words that tournament Scrabble players casually plunk down on a board look strange to outside observers regardless of lexicon. Collins just has more of them. That’s what so perplexing. An open mind about the glorious expanse of the English language is a sine qua non of competitive Scrabble. And yet this debate has boiled down to these weird words are fine but those weird words aren’t. I’ve been guilty of thinking that way myself.

Hundreds of thousands of people play Scrabble or Scrabble knockoffs—like the New York Times’s new game Crossplay, which I wrote about in April—online and on their phones every day. Only a fraction of them finds the game’s dynamic, underexposed competitive subculture and the brilliant minds that populate it. That’s too bad. I hope Scrabble players can have some rational conversations about visions for the game, and how a lexical standard might help it to grow. “I continue to dream of a single global Scrabble community, united by one lexicon and free from fragmentation,” current WESPA chair Lukeman Omo-Owolabi of Nigeria wrote on Facebook recently. “If dreams do come true, then perhaps one day we will witness a truly united and thriving worldwide Scrabble family.”

1. Here are a few more, which I found on a U.K. crossword site and then looked up in the 9th edition of Chambers (1998) that I bought when I was writing Word Freak:

charity begins at home help, support, etc. should first be given to one’s own family, countrymen, etc., before others, usu an excuse for not helping others

jaywalker a careless pedestrian whom motorists are expected to avoid running down

sea serpent (mythol) an enormous marine animal of serpent-like form frequently seen and described by credulous sailors, imaginative landsmen and common liars

2. The Jerusalem Scrabble Club still uses a North American list. (The Tel Aviv Scrabble Club plays Collins.) Thailand switched to Collins in 2018.

3. Words in a Scrabble context are capitalized. Words in a dictionary context are italicized.

4. EYEROLL is good in Collins, which defines it as “an act of rotating the eyes to indicate boredom, frustration, or alarm.” It’s also in Merriam-Webster, but only as the open compound eye roll or the hyphenated eye-roll, so it’s not on the North American Scrabble lists. Neither dictionary enters it as a verb.

5. AL appeared in an edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition “at just the wrong time for OSPD purposes,” a critic of the Scrabble word list wrote in the language journal Verbatim in 1999, “since it will live, apparently forever, even though the current edition of Random House and all of its competitors omit this extremely obscure rarity.” AL wasn’t in Chambers and isn’t even in the OED.

You can call me AL: from the 1968 Random House college dictionary. Screenshot via Internet Archive

Almost all of the rest of the North American twos are lexicographically justifiable. And that includes the much-maligned ZA—a word I uttered a billion times growing up in the New York City suburb of Pelham (shoutout 4 Corners Pizzeria)—and the infamous OE. Don’t you dare come after OE.

Here it is in my 1972 edition of Webster's New World College Dictionary. Screenshot via Internet Archive

6. The British spelling MEMORISE is acceptable in both the Collins (of course) and North American lists. But while MEMORIZER is playable in both lexicons, MEMORISER is good only in Collins. Why did the U.S. switch to -ize endings from the British -ise? Noah Webster, the Founding Father of America dictionary-making, did that as part of his simultaneous quests to phoneticize (good only in Collins, with both -ISE and -IZE endings) spelling and distinguish America’s English from the language of its colonizers (good with both endings in both lexicons). Read more about Webster in my new book, Unabridged. Preorder the paperback now!

7. The Collins English Dictionary added 1,018 words in 2024, none of which were adopted by NASPA. “The NASPA dictionary committee doesn’t take any input from WESPA,” said Chris Lipe, the chair of WESPA’s dictionary committee. For its 2024 update, WESPA rejected 42 of NASPA’s flawed additions. Separately, though, some common long words on the NASPA list—nine or more letters—have slipped through the cracks . A top U.S. player, Kenji Matsumoto, compiled a list of more than 100 common words—BABYSITTER, LAUNDROMAT, HORSERACING, YELLOWJACKET, etc.—that were added by NASPA, mostly in 2014 and 2018, but haven’t made it into Collins. The reason: NASPA’s lists of newly added long words weren’t reviewed by Merriam-Webster and included hundreds of dubious entries, including adjectives that were appended with -S, like NONDEFENSES. Lipe said he hopes to vet the full list of long words and add the valid ones.

8. An eighth edition of the OSPD is due in the fall, with 200 new words that have been added to Merriam’s online dictionary since the last edition in 2023. Based on the cover image, debutants include ABUELA, BAO, BOBA, BOOP, BURRATA, ELOTE, FUGAZI, GIRLBOSS, JAWN, PARKLET, RIZZ, and ZOOMIES. THRIFT is on the cover (twice, oops). Thrift has, of course, been a noun forever. But Merriam recently added the secondhand-shopping sense, which (back pat) I added to its New Words database while embedding at Merriam to research Unabridged. It was one of at least 38 words that I either defined or flagged that have made the online dictionary. For the full list, read the book! (Did I mention that you can preorder the paperback now?)

9. Since we won’t be able to add all of the five-, seven-, and eight-letter words in five years, the annual number should include only unique words. Inflections of shorter words don’t count toward the 5,000. My party, my rules.

10. Ze was one of the many words I defined while reporting Unabridged that have not made it into Merriam. While ze is in Collins, Dictionary. com, and the OED, which cites a first known usage date of 1864, my editor at Merriam felt that examples of the word’s use in print or online media were confined largely to writing about gender-neutral pronouns, rather than reflecting organic use as an actual pronoun. Here’s my draft definition, with copious examples. I also defined xe and hir. Did I have Scrabble in mind when I lobbied for ze and xe? Who can say!

I am eyerolling over that Bari Weiss citation.

11. TWONESS is an acceptable Scrabble word, though with a different meaning—“the quality or state of being two : DUALITY,” according to Merriam—than the one I’ve applied here.

12. Removing a two from Collins isn’t unprecedented. For years, PH was allowed, on the grounds that pH is entered in Chambers as a noun and the first letter is lowercase.

13. One big question: How to resolve differing challenge rules. North America plays the standard, Scrabble-box rule of “double challenge”—one player or the other loses a turn depending on whether a challenged word is acceptable or not. International Scrabble uses “five-point challenge,” in which a challenger doesn’t lose a turn if a word comes back good; rather, the player who played the word gets an extra five points added to his score. Double-challenge is severe—automatic loss of turn—but it’s the historic rule, rewards word knowledge, and adds an element of drama. Five-point encourages players to challenge words they’re unsure of, reducing the draconian penalty for being wrong. One possible compromise: double challenge in the top divisions, where players know more words, and five-point below that, to make challenging less punitive and retain the international rule. Note: We implemented a 10-point challenge rule at the North American School Scrabble Championship, which I help run, to reduce kids’ anxiety about challenging, especially against older or more experienced opponents. It’s worked.