Opinion Mind your Zs and Qs

The interpretation of those rules,however,has been anything but simple. This past week,outrage sounded worldwide after reports,which proved untrue,that Scrabble would permit the use of proper nouns. The linguistic dust-up was only the latest in the game’s history.

WHICH DICTIONARY? When Scrabble took off in the 1950s,disputes arose over whether words like “ma” and “pa” were permissible. Mr. Brunot declined requests to endorse a dictionary. “It’s only a game,” he told Life magazine in 1953.

Two early enthusiasts,Jacob Orleans and Edmund Jacobson,tore a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary in half and compiled a list of 30,000 words they found useful for Scrabble. By the 1970s,Funk & Wagnalls was the de facto word source for competitive play.

But that book included foreign words like “ja” and “nyet,” and it was clunky; common words were hidden in long lists starting with “un” or “re.” In 1978,the first Official Scrabble Players Dictionary,compiled from five standard college dictionaries,was published. It resolved countless disputes,but created others.

THE NO-NO LIST. In 1993,a Virginia woman was horrified to find “jew” in the O.S.P.D.,defined as “to bargain with — an offensive term.” Her complaints led Hasbro,Scrabble’s North American owner,and Merriam-Webster,publisher of the players dictionary,to delete several dozen words,among them “jesuit,” “libber” and “fart.”

Competitive Scrabblers revolted — on the board,words are devoid of meaning — and a compromise was reached. The expurgated OSPD would be for home and school play. Club and tournament play would use a book listing every word,including the “dirty” ones,sans definitions. (One Scrabbler sells a laminated bookmark of the banned words. It’s called the Poo List,after one of them.)

THE SCHISM. While Scrabble in North America is governed by the Official Club and Tournament World List,or OWL,the rest of world uses a more expansive list,Collins Scrabble Words,a combination of the OWL and Britain’s Collins English Dictionary. For decades,American and Canadian players competing abroad have had to learn thousands of additional words — and forget them while at home.

Advocates love the international game’s lexical inclusiveness and enhanced scoring potential (more words equals more chances for points). Opponents resent having to learn hundreds of new words to keep playing at a basic level. In a referendum,North American players rejected the international lexicon. Today,a few American tournaments include an international-words division.

CLEANSING THE BOOK. While some players support a bigger lexicon,others want a cleaner one. “Typical Scrabble enthusiasts are good spellers who find implausibilities on nearly every page of the OSPD,” says Dan Pratt of Russett,Md.,a retired mathematician and linguist who hopes to publish a revised word list to compete with the existing one. His reasoning: The initial OSPD relied on several standard college dictionaries dating to as early as 1963. It has been updated three times,most recently in 2006,resulting in the addition of thousands of words. Only a handful,however,have been removed. So Scrabble allows many words that can’t be found in any 21st-century American college dictionary.

Words cited by Mr. Pratt include “al” (defined in the OSPD as an East Indian tree),“oxid” (an alternate spelling of “oxide”) and “toadless” (having no toads). He even noted that one word,“knesset” (the Israeli parliament),is listed in all the dictionaries used to update the OSPD except one as,yes,a proper noun.

Fatsis is the author of ‘Word Freak: Heartbreak,Triumph,Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players.’