My Lingua Franca colleage Anne Curzan recently published a post about recent additions to the official Scrabble dictionary, of which there have been a surprisingly large number. (I guess that’s the way they’ve found to keep on selling Scrabble dictionaries.)
Naturally Anne didn’t object to this horde of new arrivals. We linguists always seem to be on the side of change, diversity, exoticness, and immigration, don’t we? But some people don’t like to see new additions. A few not only recoil at the lexicographical recognition of specific new words, but see new words as endangering the fun of the game itself.
In fact there may be some who believe that if you keep adding flocks of new words like this, the game will become too easy, because almost anything will count as a word.
At the risk of being somewhat nerdy, let me just make it clear that such fears would be wildly far off the mark.
It is very easy to use your computer to check how many strings of a given length are actual words. I often make reference to a standard machine-searchable word list of 25,000 words (a reasonable approximation to an ordinary person’s active vocabulary) that is supplied with many Unix-based systems (like Linux and Mac OS X) in a file called /usr/share/dict/words. Unfortunately many systems these days supply a less useful file 10 times bigger, stuffed with rarities and sillinesses. (The small file has 177 words ending in ation; the big one has 4,520, including ridiculous objects like counterexpostulation. Run a Google search on that and you’ll see why it’s ridic.) But let’s use both files to answer this question: How many letter strings of lengths between 1 and 7 are actual words? Here are the figures:
Source: Scrabbling for Words – Lingua Franca – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education
