Legal Words

 

Words allowed as solutions to our puzzle games follow the same general requirements used in other word games, such as Scrabble and Boggle.    Legal Words are words found in the House Dictionary[1] that are:

 

  • Not exclusively proper names.[2]
  • Not exclusively abbreviations.[3]
  • Not exclusively contractions or elisions.
  • Not exclusively prefixes or suffixes.
  • Compound words not exclusively hyphenated or given exclusively as or in phrases.[4]

 

We do not exclude foreign words, because words that have been adopted in to English from other languages and included in the House Dictionary are no longer foreign words.  Such words, even when listed with diacritics, are still legal when played here without the diacritic.  And we do not exclude words given as dialect forms, such as chiefly British, Scottish, or Southwestern, or given as archaic, obsolete, or slang.

 

Legal Words do not have to be the main entry.  Any word listed as a variant, and all inflected forms, are legal.[5]

 


[1]  Currently, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

[2]  In the dictionary, the entry, or all entries, shows the word only as initially capitalized, and there is no “not capitalized” definition.

[3]  Note that some abbreviations, such as sec for second, and acronyms, such as ESP, have achieved status as nouns or other parts of speech.  When such a term has an entry showing that it functions as a noun or other part of speech, even though it is shown as all-caps, it is a legal word.

[4]  This excludes words exclusively “used in combination.”

[5]  Not all inflected forms are listed.  Most ordinary plurals, adding s or es, and some ordinary verb inflections are not listed separately, but when a particular plural (or other) form is listed, the standard plural is usually excluded (women, not womans) unless it is also listed.  Some nouns, hoever, do not have plurals.  E.g., the noun go, the game, has no plural “gos” – or even “goes,” but “goes” is legal as the present tense, singular, of the verb go.  In competition and in the awarding of points, these cases are House rulings.