Is That a Real Word? Scrabble Dictionaries vs. the Ones on Your Shelf
Every family that owns a Scrabble board has had the argument. Someone plays QI, someone else says “that’s not a word,” and a phone comes out. Both sides are right, which is the interesting part: QI is unquestionably valid in the game and genuinely odd at the dinner table. The gap between those two judgments is the gap between two different kinds of dictionary — built by different people, for different purposes, answering different questions.
Two dictionaries, two jobs
A desk dictionary — Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, the OED — is a reference: it exists to tell you what words mean, how they are pronounced, and where they came from. A game dictionary is a ruling: a flat yes/no list whose only job is to end table arguments quickly and identically every time. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was created in the 1970s precisely because tournament players needed a single referee; before it, every club ruled by whatever dictionary happened to be on the shelf. Definitions in a game list are an afterthought — validity is the product.
One game, two rulebooks
It gets stranger: competitive Scrabble runs on two different lists depending on where you live. North American play uses the OSPD lineage (published by Merriam-Webster, whose FAQ cheerfully explains the split), while most of the rest of the world uses Collins Scrabble Words — a noticeably larger list. Tens of thousands of words are good in London and dead in Chicago. A word’s “reality” can depend on the tournament’s postal code, which should permanently retire the idea that there is one master list somewhere.
“Is it a word?” has at least three honest answers: in the dictionary, in the word list, and in actual use. They overlap — but they are not the same circle.
The great word purge of 1994
The clearest proof that game lists and desk dictionaries answer different questions came in 1994, when the OSPD’s publishers — responding to public complaints — expurgated roughly two hundred offensive words from the printed dictionary sold in toy stores. Tournament players revolted: whatever one thinks of the words, they argued, a referee’s job is to rule on legality, not politeness, and a smaller list changes the game itself. The compromise still stands today: the family-friendly OSPD on bookstore shelves, and a separate, unexpurgated tournament word list used in sanctioned club play. One game, one publisher, two censuses of English — because one list is a consumer product and the other is a rulebook. No episode better illustrates that “is it in the dictionary?” is always shorthand for “is it in which dictionary, compiled for what?”
Why game lists keep words dictionaries forget
Game lists are conservative in a peculiar way: once a word is in, it tends to stay, because removing it would invalidate remembered knowledge. So the Scrabble lists preserve a museum of two-letter oddities (aa, a type of lava; oe, a Faroese wind), archaic spellings, and dialect survivals that desk dictionaries prune for space. Meanwhile the game lists lag on new vocabulary — a word can be in every newspaper for years before a list update blesses it. The two kinds of dictionary drift apart from both ends, and the drift is measurable in the two-letter words every serious player memorizes: a fair chunk of them will earn you a blank stare outside the game.
The words only games keep alive
Some words now exist almost entirely inside the board. Za (pizza), zax (a slate-cutting tool), qat (a variant of khat), xu (a Vietnamese coin) — these are real words with real histories, but their day job is scoring points. There is something touching about it: the game functions as a wildlife refuge for vocabulary that would otherwise be extinct. Learning them pays immediately, since the rare letters they carry are the most valuable tiles in the bag — the arithmetic of which is laid out well in this guide to Scrabble tile values and what they’re really worth. Our own Scrabble finder and the 10-point word lists exist for exactly this kind of prospecting.
So what should “real word” mean?
Linguists would say the question is upside down: a word is real when a community uses it with a shared meaning — dictionaries of every kind trail behind that fact, cataloguing it with different nets. Dictionary.com’s own wordplay desk treats game validity as one register among many, and that is the sane view. Qi is a real word (Mandarin loan, standard in discussions of Chinese philosophy and medicine) that happens to be over-represented on game boards; irregardless is a real word (in Merriam-Webster, labeled nonstandard) that careful writers still avoid. “Real” is a spectrum with registers, and every dictionary is a flashlight pointed at part of it. The full sweep of the language — game-legal, formal, obsolete, and everything between — is bigger than any one list; browsing an unfiltered dictionary index is the quickest way to feel how much bigger.
Real-word FAQ
Is QI a real word?
Yes — it is the standard romanization of the Chinese concept of vital energy, in mainstream dictionaries as well as both Scrabble lists. Its fame as a game word has outgrown its civilian life, but the civilian life is genuine.
Why do the American and international Scrabble dictionaries differ?
Different source dictionaries and different editorial histories: the OSPD was built from American desk dictionaries, while Collins merged British and international sources into a larger list. The communities have simply never unified them.
If a word is in the Scrabble dictionary, can I use it in writing?
Legally, of course — but game validity says nothing about register. A game list answers “may I play it?”, not “will my reader know it?”. For writing, the desk dictionary’s usage labels are the better referee.