Lexicon Transition at the Lexington, MA Scrabble® Club

The National Scrabble Association has declared that the official word list used for competitive Scrabble® in clubs and tourneys in North America will be changing on March 1, 2006. The Lexington club is making the transition from OWL1 to OWL2 over a four-week period starting on February 16, 2006. During this period, special rules involving the lexicon change are being used at Thursday evening club sessions. Players have the right to look at the list of words of length 2 through 8 which are added and deleted by this update. As usual, the WHAT program is used to handle challenges, but it will be set in "Lexicon Transition Challenge" mode in which there is no penalty for challenging a play where all the words are added or deleted ones. This is further explained below.

Starting on February 16, 2006, WHAT will be used with a primary lexicon of OWL2 and a secondary lexicon of TWL98 (a.k.a. OWL1). For the foreseeable future, new OWL2 words which are presented in the WHAT workspace when you use its anagramming features are annotated with a suffix plus sign. For more information on the WHAT program see: http://what.wolfberg.net

The remainder of this page describes WHAT's Lexicon Transition Mode. To be sure WHAT is operating in this mode, the dark blue header line at the top of the Challenge Dialog window; should read:
"Lexicon Transition Challenge - TWL98 to OWL2 - Official North America Word List (060123)"

Usually, a challenge results in WHAT's making one of these rulings:

Yes, the play is ACCEPTABLE (using green letters), or
No, the play is UNACCEPTABLE (using red letters).

But in this special lexicon transition mode, WHAT may indicate two other possible rulings:

Yes, the play is OWL2-ACCEPTABLE - no penalty
No, the play is OWL2-UNACCEPTABLE - no penalty

These messages are in blue letters, and the ruling remains visible for a 12-second duration, instead of the usual 6-second duration, to permit players to read and contemplate the special ruling.

When more than one word is challenged:

if all words are in the new lexicon and at least one word is in the old lexicon, the play is ACCEPTABLE (with penalty);
if at least one word is not in the new lexicon and there is at least one word which is in or out of both lexicons, the play is UNACCEPTABLE (with penalty).

Here are some examples:

Challenged Play	Ruling	Comment
QAT	Yes, the play is ACCEPTABLE
QI	Yes, the play is OWL2-ACCEPTABLE - no penalty
QAT,QI	Yes, the play is ACCEPTABLE
EMF	No, the play is OWL2-UNACCEPTABLE - no penalty	Remove the play from the board.
EMF,FONY	No, the play is UNACCEPTABLE	Remove the play from the board.
QI,EMF	No, the play is OWL2-UNACCEPTABLE - no penalty	Remove the play from the board.

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This page, maintained by Mike Wolfberg, was last updated on November 06, 2007.