• ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    81
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    So the article explains that official tournaments use a unique words list that contains a lot of generous words like “zzz” and “aa”. Mostly intended to allow high scoring words for people who studied their list.

    The company that maintains the list has added a lot more of these “not a real word but it scores high so we added it” words.

    For some highlight words from the article: MIREPOIXS, HORSEFEATHERSES, SUBSPECIESES, GRATINEEED

    Players are complaining that high level tournaments are basically going to be competitions for who knows the most gibberish from the tournament word list and it is alienating the general population from joining tournaments and scrabble clubs.

    • Rogue@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m pretty sure the tournaments are just memorising lists. A man won the French competition without being able to speak French… He just memorised the accepted words.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      1 year ago

      Words in scrabble should be things that people actually use outside scrabble. It’s fair if that makes some leeway for slang. It’s also fair if it means that some really obscure words that nobody really uses get in. But, this seems over the line because they’re taking words that nobody uses, and tacking on un-grammatical endings.

    • JoBo@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The 10x number of new words added compared to previous editions, and the nonsensical nature of so many of the new entries, says it has to be AI. There’s no way some of those would make it past a human editor (except one lazily accepting everything the AI suggests as truth).