Accepted Scrabble Words
Players may place any word which can be found in a standard English language dictionary. Official Scrabble dictionaries also can be found in bookstores and online.
Types of words which cannot be used are abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes. Words that require a hyphen or an apostrophe cannot be played. Words that are spelled with a capital letter cannot be used.
Generally speaking in an English-language game of Scrabble, foreign words cannot be placed on the Scrabble board. If those words appear in a standard English dictionary, then the word is allowable. This is because the word is spoken often enough by native English-speakers that it has become a part of the English language.
On the Scrabble website there is an online Scrabble Dictionary word search. Plug in a word you think it exists (this is called "scrabblenogging") and hit the return key and see what it says. If it comes up saying that the word "does not appear in Merriam-Webster's Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary, 4th Edition" then that word is unplayable and does not count for points.
And so, that got me thinking. Suppose you have a group of people who are deaf, hard of hearing, hearing and culturally deaf people. One person puts down a long 8 lettered word "deafhood" that nets a good number of Scrabble points but the group challenges the person saying the word doesn't exist. A quick trip to the online Scrabble Dictionary search gets this result:
If this were to be a real Scrabble tournament that word "deafhood" would not be accepted and cannot be counted. The same thing goes for other made up words that might come to your mind. Something like the a-wordism, for example.
Scrabble rules are clear and firm. Let's not be the selfish scrabblenogger and do things "unofficially" when it doesn't count in the real game of Scrabble.
Let your standard dictionary be your friend. When in doubt, always refer to the online Scrabble Dictionary to do the search for you.
