Skip to main content

Online Dictionary dilemmas

Okay, so the Zen Word game doesn't have the "best" dictionary.  No online game will have the same word set that my brain has stored.  This game is missing older versions of key verbs, so HATH and SAITH are not there, however many times they show up in the Bible.  But THEE and THOU ar(t).  

It's weird when a singular or plural is accepted but not both.  So it accepts MEDS but not MED, REC but not RECS.  

Don't ask me how it accepts GLOP but not GLOOP, takes BONG and BING but not BOING.  WONK and THO and VAIL are ok but NAV and ZIN (short for Zinfandel, the wine, a valid Scrabble word) and LITH are not?  As far as artifacts go, TOR (the monument) is okay but TORC (the necklace) is not?

Each game decides on what to censor.  This game accepts PEE, PEED, PEES, POO (etc) and PORN where the other word unscramblers did not.  Words that are considered racist, or gender-related insults are blocked, and I won't type those here.  But it does take ASS (which is an animal) and ARSE (which is too British to count, I suppose), but no variation of S-words or F-words, which is fine.

As the levels fly by, it does feel like the words are getting harder, although their "Hard" or "Super Hard" warnings are still pretty easy.  Some recent stumpers were WARBLER, and to me FASHION looks weird because I hardly ever use that word.  What was DYFIGNI?  Oh, DIGNIFY. Our eyes are so finely tuned to our own history with words, that to me AWKWARD and CRYPTIC just stick out at a glance, but I suppose it would look alien to many users.  THOUGHT looks weird, but it's a favorite, since the whole series of OUGHT, TOUGH, THOUGH, and THOUGHT come out.

Oddly, I was just walking on a break at work thinking of how FLATLY would be a little tricky if scrambled right, and I got a puzzle with FATALLY, which is just FLATLY with an extra A.

I just got GLALZEE, which just leaps out as GAZELLE.  It took ALLEE as a walkway between rows of trees.

"MIHIULT" and "YERSTYM" I leave to you. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?

RULY, RECK, and RobWords

There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not.  A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it.  I tried explaining it to Anne.  It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds."  It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here .  "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled.   It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong.  Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview.  I have been enjoy...

why not SQUUUSH?

There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things.  This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29.  SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHI...