An update to the Scrabble dictionary, the hidden beauty in a Queens puzzle, and mapping Crossclimb

Welcome to Gametime, a weekly newsletter recapping the past week of games on LinkedIn, what’s new in the puzzles space, and more — brought to you by LinkedIn Games Editor Paolo Pasco . Click 'Subscribe' to join the community and be notified of future editions.

If you read my interview last month with Scrabble champion Mack Meller, you know top-level Scrabble players put untold amounts of effort into memorizing entries in the Scrabble dictionary. Knowledge of which words are acceptable can make or break a game, especially since playing an invalid word can cost a player a turn, losing a precious opportunity to score points.?

Some players have taken dictionary knowledge to its extreme. In 2015, Scrabble legend Nigel Richards won the French-language Scrabble World Championships. The odd thing about this: he didn’t speak French at all . He spent months studying the French Scrabble Dictionary, and was able to win the tournament just through word memorization.

But mastering the Scrabble dictionary isn’t as simple as spending a single period to focus on memorizing every word and then using that for the rest of your Scrabble career. This is because Scrabble is a game based on language — and language evolves. Necessarily, the Scrabble dictionary evolves, with changes being made regularly to reflect changes in how people use words.

On August 15 this year, the Collins Dictionary added 2,000 words to its version of the official Scrabble dictionary. New additions include OWO (an online expression of surprise), BIRRIA (a Mexican stew), IMMA (a contracted form of “I’m going to”), ACK (an expression of frustration), and NIBLING (a gender-neutral term for a sibling’s child, as an alternative to “niece” or “nephew”). Many of these changes reflect evolutions in slang, but others (like BIRRIA and DALGONA) reflect the incorporation of non-English terms into English-speaking consciousness. This touches on a broader, tougher question: how does someone decide what “counts” as a word, especially where foreign terms are involved? A standard gut check of “how likely the average person is to see this word” is fraught, especially since “average” is relative. In communities with Korean backgrounds, DALGONA (a Korean candy) is likely a very familiar word.?

Changes to Scrabble dictionaries aren’t limited to the additions of new terms. In 2020, after much debate, Hasbro (owner of Scrabble in the U.S.) announced that the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) would be removing slurs and other offensive words from their Scrabble dictionary, thus making them invalid for tournament play. This sparked a series of other debates; many Scrabble players applauded the decision, but others felt that this was an overreaction — even if words are offensive, those people argued, they’re still words.

All this is to say, the history Scrabble dictionary provides a fascinating look at the concepts we as humans choose to think and talk about, as well as the changes in how we think about words. Moreover, we can see that the process of defining what “counts” as a word is a complicated one, which raises many questions — but as language continues to evolve, it’s important to keep thinking about these questions. At this point, all I know is that you’d best remember OWO in case it bails you out of a tight spot in a future Scrabble game.

?? Pinpoint: It seems like in the past few editions of this newsletter, the Pinpoint section has had a running theme: Pinpoints about words that go before/after other words tend to be hard. But this past week, the universe had a contrarian streak: the Sunday, August 25 words that come before “box” puzzle had a 93.3% solve rate! Looking at the comments, people had a good time with the clues (“Lunch,” “Sand,” “Mail,” “Safe deposit,” “Think outside the”). I enjoyed reading about the reasons people were able to complete it so quickly, including someone who was just shopping for school supplies, so “lunchbox” was top of mind. My hypothesis for the high solve rate was that the last two clues (especially “Think outside the”) just feel incomplete without the word “box,” so stumped solvers would have a good amount of help getting over the finish line. But, the average number of guesses needed by successful solvers was just 3.2, so maybe all you solvers are just very good.?

Not to be outdone, the Monday, August 26 movie genres puzzle may be the puzzle with the highest-ever solve rate, at a stunning 98%. For the second day in a row, the comments show a lot of “?? ? ? ? ? (1/5),” since the first clue, “Thriller,” was very evocative of movie genres. The second most frequent guess from the first clue was “michael jackson”/”michael jackson songs,” which over 20,000 of you submitted. All in all, the average number of guesses needed was 1.4, marking the first time in a while that the number of guesses has dipped below 2.

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: We’ve been on a string of five-letter Crossclimbs lately; hopefully, the transition into the five-letter period has been treating you well. I’ve been enjoying writing them, hard as they are to put together. Finding two five-letter words that are six letter changes apart from each other isn’t easy, especially with the constraint that the two top and bottom words be somehow related. Despite that, I enjoy the chance to use some words that don’t show up as often in Crossclimbs (I love four-letter words, but I can only come up with so many different clues for HARE).

The use of SHALE in the Sunday, August 25 puzzle ending in two synonyms for “overused” (TRITE/STALE) sparked a lot of conversation, specifically from people who weren’t familiar with the rock and those who perceived it to be an Americanism (although, even though SHALE is very commonly found in the U.S., it’s found all over the world ). All I can say is: if you didn’t know the word, hopefully you remembered the discussion for today’s Crossclimb!

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: The Monday, August 26 puzzle was the fastest of the week, with an average solve of 1 minute 35 seconds. But, this puzzle might’ve gone so quickly for many people, they may have missed a subtly elegant design feature. This puzzle, titled “Clones” behind the scenes, had two groups of three colored regions that have exactly the same shape, but are diagonally reflected. Take the orange, blue, and green shapes across the top row, and compare them to the pink, light blue, and red shapes across the left column. The only difference between the two is that the shapes across the top are offset by a single column — and with just those two groups of regions, it’s possible to obtain a unique solution!

Fun fact: This was also the closest the Crossclimb and Queens average times have been to each other in a while, with 1:35 for Crossclimb and 1:28 for Queens.?

The Tuesday, August 27 puzzle was large for a Tuesday, coming in at 10x10. But, this doesn’t mean it was appreciably harder. In fact, it’s possible to use a certain strategy twice, in order to place two Queens from the start. Can you see it?

If you notice the yellow, red, and brown sections towards the bottom of the grid, you can see that those three sections cover the bottom three rows. This means you can place X’s in any cell in those three rows outside of those sections. This leaves only one available place for a Queen in the cross-shaped light blue section, so you can place a Queen there.

You can do the same with the orange, pink, and brown sections towards the right of the grid, which cover a section of three consecutive columns. Likewise, you can place X’s in any cell in those three columns outside of those sections. This leaves only one available place for a Queen in the green section, so you can place another Queen there.

I appreciate moments of symmetry like this — a very helpful thing to look for in some grids, in order to see if you can reapply some strategies you’ve previously used to get better results.

Play today’s Queens

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This week’s topic: Graphically exploring word ladders

I saw a fascinating video from the YouTuber CodeParade, graphically exploring word ladders (like the ones you see in Crossclimb):

I found the sections on four-letter and five-letter words to be especially fascinating (predictably, since Crossclimbs deal with words of those lengths). You can see that five-letter words are hard to connect to each other. Looking at the graph for words of those lengths, the fully-connected component of “words that connect to each other” is much smaller than the fully-connected web of four-letter words. Granted, we allow ourselves to use a slightly larger wordlist (for example, we allow for a few reasonable proper nouns, as a contrast to the video’s wordlist of common words from the English dictionary), but it’s a nice look at the type of wordplay that makes Crossclimb possible.

What surprised you about the video? How do you feel about five-letter Crossclimbs?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??,

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