Collins Scrabble Words (CSW, formerly SOWPODS) is the word list used in English-language tournament

Scrabble ''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a Board game, game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, re ...

in most countries except the US, Thailand and Canada, although Scrabble tournaments in the US and Canada are also organized with divisions that use Collins Scrabble Words as their lexicon, some under the auspices of organizations such as the Collins Coalition. The term SOWPODS is an

anagram An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word ''anagram'' itself can be rearranged into the phrase "nag a ram"; which ...

of the two abbreviations '' OSPD'' (Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) and '' OSW'' (Official Scrabble Words), these being the original two official dictionaries used in various parts of the world at the time. Although the two source dictionaries have now changed their respective titles, the term SOWPODS is still used by tournament players to refer to the combination of the two sources. There has not been any actual hard-copy list produced called SOWPODS, although the current Collins Scrabble Words, or CSW, is in effect the full SOWPODS list by a different name. Currently the two main sources for the words making up the combined list (generally known as Collins) are: * The

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words. Derived from two sources; the ''

Collins English Dictionary The ''Collins English Dictionary'' is a printed and online dictionary of English. It is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow. It was first published in 1979. Corpus The dictionary uses language research based on the Collins Corpus, which is ...

'' and the ''Collins Corpus'', and * The American words. From the '' NASPA Word List'', formerly ''Official Tournament and Club Word List'', or ''TWL'', derived from the '' Merriam-Webster's Dictionary'' and four other collegiate dictionaries. Latest version is NWL2023.

History

In 1980 in the United Kingdom, the ''

Chambers Dictionary ''The Chambers Dictionary'' was first published by William and Robert Chambers as ''Chambers's English Dictionary'' in 1872. It was an expanded version of ''Chambers's Etymological Dictionary'' of 1867, compiled by James Donald. A second editio ...

'' 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,

declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and det ...

s and

plural In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...

s was published under the title '' Official Scrabble Words'' from Chambers (this would come to be known as OSW). North American Scrabble was using the '' Official Scrabble Players Dictionary'' (OSPD), hence when the first

World Scrabble Championship The World Scrabble Championship (WSC) is played to determine the world champion in competitive English-language Scrabble. It was held in every odd year from 1991 to 2013; from 2013 onwards, it became an annual event. The most successful player i ...

took place in 1991 words from either word source were allowed. Over the following years there was disagreement 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). In December 2003, Collins took over the publication of the official word list sanctioned by WESPA, and the current edition is CSW22. The only change from CSW19 to CSW22 is the deletion of 419 words deemed to be hate speech. This is following a directive from

Mattel Mattel, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational corporation, multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company headquartered in El Segundo, California. Founded in Los Angeles by Harold Matson and the husband-and-wife duo of Ruth Handler, ...

, who committed to ongoing review and removal of words and definitions, removing hate speech from the game and obliging Collins publisher as a licensee to implement these changes.

Word count

References

External links

www.collinsdictionary.com – Collins Scrabble Word Finder
{{Scrabble Scrabble lexica English dictionaries

History

Word count

See also

References

External links