SOWPODS
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SOWPODS is a term used to refer to the word list used in tournament Scrabble in all English-speaking countries[1] except the USA, Canada, Thailand and Israel[2], which use the American Tournament Word List or TWL. Official Scrabble Words: International Edition, published by Chambers, was the book used for word adjudication in international tournaments and all tournaments played to the SOWPODS word list, from its publication in 2001 until the adoption of Collins Scrabble Tournament and Club Word List, in 2007. The SOWPODS word list comprises words from two official dictionaries used in various parts of the world—Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD, derived from the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and four other college dictionaries), and Official Scrabble Words (OSW, derived from the Chambers Dictionary). The name is an anagram of the two abbreviations.
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[edit] History
In 1980 in the United Kingdom, the Chambers Dictionary[3] replaced the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as the official choice for arbitration of the British National Scrabble Championship. In 1988 for the first time a single list of all the valid words, without the ambiguity of discussing conjugations, declensions and plurals was published under the title Official Scrabble Words from Chambers (this would come to be known as OSW). North American Scrabble was using the OSPD, hence when the first World Scrabble Championship took place in 1991 words from either word source were allowed.
Over the following years debate raged in the competitive Scrabble community over the desirability of a combined word source, which came to be known as SOWPODS as an easily-pronounced anagram of OSW and OSPD. Australia changed all its rated tournaments to using the SOWPODS word list in 1994, while the UK made the same change in 2001. This latter move coincided with the publication of the first official book to contain all words from OSW and OSPD (Chambers' Official Scrabble Words: International Edition).
[edit] Word count
SOWPODS 2006 includes 267,751 words[4], of which there are:
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