What Is A Word?

Before I go into an extended discourse, let me give the context for this. Yesterday the linguistics organization on campus held their Scrabble tournament. Like last semester, I won easily. But during one of the games, my opponent was obviously upset over the words I was playing. The best example, and a large part of the reason why I'm writing this, was when I played MIR and she challenged. It's good, and the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) gave defined it as a Russian peasant community. She said that was absurd and it shouldn't be in the dictionary because it's a Russian word. I kept quiet then. A few turns later, she played RIO* and I challenged it off. That really set her off - she was in disbelief that they would allow MIR and not RIO*. "If they accept Russian words, they should accept Spanish too. Everyone uses rio, but I've never even heard of mir." I tried to provide some explanation, but she wouldn't even consider it. To the end she complained of how she lost because she got "screwed by the dictionary."

So what is a valid word? A word in the dictionary, you might say. But how do the editors choose which words to include? In the case of the OSPD, it's fairly straightforward. If it's in another dictionary, it gets included. Originally it was a compilation of six major English dictionaries. If a word appeared in Oxford, Webster, American Heritage... or a few other English language dictionaries, it was included in the OSPD. It's certainly not without errors of its own however. Supposedly, there are some words that have made it into the OSPD because of typos and they've remained. But for the most part, it's hard to place the blame on the Scrabble dictionary. If you want to argue that a word should or should not be included, you have to take that to one of the very reputable dictionaries of the English language. (In my American Heritage Dictionary, mir appears with the same definition, while rio only appears in reference to specific river names.) It's important to note this because the OSPD gets a lot of flak for containing "fake" words. How arrogant is it to assume that you have better judgment of a word than professionals who compile the most esteemed dictionaries?

In the case of mir and rio, why would one be accepted by an English dictionary and the other be rejected? My answer during the game was that mir had been adopted into English while rio remained a Spanish word. That didn't help anything because, though true, you still must ask why mir alone is adopted. Unlike rio, mir has no counterpart in the English language. Rio has a direct translation to English - river. There's absolutely no reason to incorporate rio when a direct translation exists. However, look at a word like burrito that has been adopted from Spanish. It was adopted because there was no English counterpart to the word. Given the introduction of the burrito itself, English speakers had the option to either call it by its Spanish name or create an entirely new English word. In most cases, I think the foreign word is adopted***. Similarly, I believe mir was adopted into English because it was necessary to identify mirs in some way, and the native name was easier than creating an entirely new word.

Seems logical, right? I'm sure it's not that easy for all words, however. Like I mentioned in a previous post, transliteration becomes a huge problem. Why do some transliterations make the cut and others don't? Should all of them be included? One of the great examples of several different transliterations being accepted is the Yiddish word ganef. Ganef, ganof, gonef, gonif, goniff, and gonof are all accepted as valid words by the Scrabble dictionary (which means they appear in the major English dictionaries as well). Many of the q without u words are adopted from transliterations of Arabic. But many alternate spellings (especially the ones used by my Islam textbook) haven't made it to English. I'm at a loss for how that's resolved. I can only guess that the editors of dictionaries adopt it when it becomes common enough in scholarly work or popular usage.

Scrabble and other word games are in a unique position because of their reliance on an external data field that is constantly changing (even if those changes are only reflected every few years with dictionary updates). No other games have this problem. Chess, Monopoly, any card game - they all have fixed rules that are contained within the game itself. You never hear of anyone throwing down the newspaper and cursing their Sudoku for including the number 7. Even with the changing dictionary, you should never hear the vast majority of complaints about words in Scrabble. When you're playing any game, you agree to play by whatever the rules are. When you agree to use the OSPD as judge on disputed words, you're taking that word set as it is. It could be a completely arbitrary collection of words and it wouldn't make any difference (and some people choose to use a less inclusive dictionary, which amounts to the same thing). When people complain that a word shouldn't be allowed because they don't know it, they're rejecting one of the fundamental pillars of the game: good word knowledge is rewarded. It's absurd to judge the validity of a word based on personal exposure. If you don't believe it, open up a dictionary and see how long it takes to find a word you don't know.





*** This is less true of French. The French are notorious language snobs and have L'Académie française, an official organization in charge of the language. They're more likely to create their own words (or at least a uniquely French accent and pronunciation), but many foreign terms still make it into the language via popular usage.