Investigating words: Validity (part 4: variant spellings)

Posts in this series: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.


One thing I have not yet touched on is the issue of inflected and derived forms of variant spellings.  The Macquarie tends to be fairly poor about listing these (mostly, it does not), and that causes problems if the rules mentioned so far are taken very literally.

Here are some examples that could have arisen from episodes so far:

• PLOW is listed as a variant spelling of PLOUGH, and PLOUGHER as a derived form of PLOUGH; the variant derived form PLOWER (episode 334) is not listed.
• MOLDY is listed as a variant spelling of MOULDY, and MOULDIER as an inflected form of MOULDY; the variant inflected form MOLDIER (episode 357) is not listed.
• STOMODEUM is listed as a variant spelling of STOMODAEUM, which has STOMODAEA as its plural and STOMODAEAL as a derived form.  Neither STOMODEA nor STOMODEAL (episode 423) are listed.
• SIGNALED and SIGNALING are listed as variant spellings of SIGNALLED and SIGNALLING, inflected forms of SIGNAL.  However, while SIGNALLER is listed as a derived form, SIGNALER (episode 424) is not mentioned as a variant of it.
• AUMBRY is listed as a variant spelling of AMBRY, and AMBRIES as the plural of AMBRY; the variant plural AUMBRIES (episode 443) is not listed.

A strict reading of the show's rules, and of the policies that David has announced, would render all of these invalid.  My personal hope, though, is that David adopts a more lenient approach.  Indeed, he may already do so but it just has not come up yet.  Specifically, I would hope that where a variant spelling exists, and a derived or inflected form of the main spelling is listed, then the corresponding derived or inflected form of the variant spelling is also allowed.

There is probably some caveat needed if there are cases for which the variant spelling is significantly different in a way which would impact the derived or inflected form, but my expectation is that very few, if any, cases of this would arise.

Such a policy would make all the above words valid, with the possible exception of SIGNALER.  I'm OK with that, and consider it an acceptable casualty; I do think that all of the others should be allowed, and I hope that David has a policy along those lines in mind.


Posts in this series: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.

Investigating words: Validity (part 3: nouns)

Posts in this series: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.


Part 1 covered the basics, while part 2 dealt with adjectives and verbs.  This post will go into nouns in a bit more detail, although sadly it will mostly reflect confusion on my part.  This is the section where by far the majority of David's discretion would be required.

Investigating words: Validity (part 2: adjectives and verbs)

Posts in this series: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.


In part 1 I covered the basics of allowed words and inflected forms; this post will cover the easier cases in a little more detail.  Those cases are the inflected forms of adjectives and verbs; most of the possible uncertainties in those areas have been cleared up, but not all.

Investigating words: Validity (part 1: basic rules)

Posts in this series: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.


Since I'm not going to reblog the current episodes (here's the link page for them), I thought this would be a good week to talk about some other things.  We'll see how that turns out.


An ongoing concern for me and perhaps for other watchers of the show -- and certainly for contestants! -- is how to tell if a particular word is going to be allowed or not.  A lot of the time this is fairly easy to answer, but there is also a considerable grey area.  When a contestant steps into that realm of uncertainty then David makes a ruling, but the players at home are not so fortunate.  This is the first of three posts in which I am going to attempt to set out the situation as I understand it.

Additionally, over the course of this blog there have been several words come up for consideration which are of uncertain validity (or were at the time).  If they had been chosen on the show then we would have got a ruling, of course, so these are words which have not yet been tried.  (Or possibly, tried in episodes before this blog started.)  I'm going to list many of them in the appropriate parts, often with my guesses as to validity.

Investigating words: Why the Macquarie?

A while ago I posted a comment on the Letters and Numbers website responding to complaints about the show's use of the Macquarie dictionary.  It has long since vanished, and I figure that sooner or later I'll want to say much the same again, so here's a post about it for posterity.  This is somewhat longer than the original comment, because I now have more room to ramble.

Every so often on that website someone will complain (usually with disproportionate ire) about some particular word being disallowed (or, more rarely, allowed).  Obviously, the show must have some decision procedure about which sequences of letters are going to be considered valid words for its scoring purposes; otherwise the contestants would be all "That's a nice tnetennba" about things.  So a list of valid words is needed, and the natural and sensible approach is to use a dictionary for this purpose.

One could take this suggestion further and say that several dictionaries would be better, as any specific dictionary is likely to have omissions due to the English language continually evolving.  That is a reasonable point of view in general, but I feel there are two reasons that it does not work for the show.  The first is a pragmatic one: Having to check more than one source would slow down the show production for very little benefit.  The other is more about the keen home viewers (or prospective contestants): A desirable feature is for them to be able to do this checking themselves; this increases involvement and a sense of transparency in the decision procedure.  Having more than one source would significantly raise the cost to them of doing so.

The second reason also argues against using some custom word list that the show has put together (or one of the Scrabble word lists); it is harder for the interested home viewer / prospective contestant to get their hands on that than a published dictionary.

Assuming that the above reasoning is accepted, the question becomes: Which dictionary to use?  There are many points to take into consideration, but one point trumps them all: Since this is an Australian show, as much as possible of the everyday Australian vernacular should be allowed.  The Macquarie is unquestionably the most comprehensive dictionary of English as used in Australia, including a wide range of colloquialisms and regionalisms, and it is thus the only sensible choice of dictionary for this show.

There are drawbacks to using only the Macquarie (as there would be to any dictionary), and I've gone on about some of them in the past before.  But the key point is that it is the most appropriate of the available alternatives.  I support the show's use of the Macquarie as their reference dictionary, while at the same time hoping that the next edition will address what I see as some of the deficiencies in it (especially with regard to its use in Letters and Numbers).


If anyone from the Macquarie somehow ends up reading this: The major issue is the inflected forms, which are lamentably inconsistently handled.  In some cases reading an entry leaves me completely unclear as to the correct spelling for an inflection (usually the plural of a noun or the present tense of a verb, where the question of -s or -es is not always straightforward).  Nouns ending in 'o' are particularly troublesome in this regard; there are examples where the plural form(s) are explicitly listed when only -s is allowed, when only -es is allowed, and when both are allowed.  So when no plural form is listed (for an obviously pluralisable noun) there is no good basis to infer which is supposed to be the case.

In contrast, my copy of The Chambers Dictionary (1993) does a wonderful job of dealing with this that I would love the Macquarie to emulate: In just two pages up front it gives the basic rules that it follows for what the default inflected forms are (depending on the last letter or so of the word).  It then only lists inflections where those rules do not suffice, and as a result I can be completely certain when I look at an entry in it what all the accepted inflected forms are (according to it).