Dictionary Defs: ACARI

Continuing your browsing through the As, you come across ACARI, which has the definition, "plural of ACARUS."

An ACARUS is a mite, so ACARI are lots of mites.

Dictionary Defs: ABOULIA

Continuing to browse through the As of your Scrabble Dictionary, you come across ABOULIA, and the definition given is ABULIA.

ABULIA:  the loss of willpower

Conjugated
ABULIC
ABOULIC

Dictionary Defs: ABOUGHT

If you're browsing through the As of your Scrabble dictionary, and come across the word ABOUGHT, the definition is that it is the past tense of ABY and ABYE.

ABY means "to pay the penalty for. It is also apelled ABYE.

Conjugations:
ABY
ABOUGHT
ABYING
ABYS
ABYES

1552 words used to date

Last year I had started my project to use every word in the Scrabble Dictionary - but I restarted it from the very beginning on 8/28/2012 for various and sundry reasons.

So in the last 60 days (give or take a couple of days here and there where I played no games) I have used 1552 new words (plus probably another thousand duplicate words.)

Now that I'm all caught up with inputting all the words I use in each game into an Excel file, I still have to highlight them in my Scrabble dictionary. Sometimes I do this as I play - along with writing them down in a notebook dedicated to the purpose, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood, and write them down but don't highlight them.

I've got about 10-20 games where I need to highlight the words in my dictionary.

And what I will try to do is list here, every day, which new words I've used.

I've only got a little over 99,000 words to go!

Dictionary Defs: ABACA and ABAKA

If you're browsing through your Scrabble dictionary, in the As, and come across the word ABAKA, you'll find that the definition directs you to ABACA.

ABACA: a Phillipine plant

Learn:
ABACA
ABAKA

Words with Friends at WAlmart

I saw this yesterday as I was walking around the toy aisles at my local Walmart - a physical Words with Friends game. The only difference is they don't seem to have triple word scores in the board corners.

I don't know how they can get away with it. It's so clearly a variation of Scrabble - it's got to be copyright infringement! It's one thing for it to be a phone app...but to have it be an actual physical board?

Strange!

The quirks of computer tile selection

I think I've blogged about this before but I'm going to blog about it again.

In my goal to use every single word in the Scrabble Dictionary, I play a lot of games online at Wordbiz.com.  (You play real people from around the world, but it's the computer that hands out the tiles.)

And whenever I win, 90% of the time, it seems that I win because I get all the good letters - that'd be the power letters, and my opponent gets nothing. And whenever I lose, it's the other way around. Very rarely...maybe 5 to 10% of the time, if that, are the tiles distributed evenly so that it really comes down to skill and knowledge as to who is going to win.

Yesterday I challenged a guy ranked 100 points above me. I wasn't worried. I've got the knowledge to be ranked 100 points higher than I am. Plus I'd won 5 games in a row.

So I'm playing a guy ranked in the 600s while I'm in the 500s...and I get nothing. 6 vowels and 1 consonant or vice versa. I'm reduced to playing very simple words because that's all I could play. He beat me by a hundred points. VERY ANNOYING.

But, I don't get too upset... after all my main goal is to cross off word after word in the dictionary. (Indeed, on more than one occasion I've passed up a high-scoring word in order to play something off another word - a conjugation of it - to make sure I can cross that word off. So that plays havoc with my scores on occasion!)