venta

Right, then, Boggle fans. Despite the blandishments of Perl and Excel, I have buggered around with bits of paper and Emacs keyboard macros to calculate the scores.

Any word which was listed by more than one person doesn't count - there were a lot of very suspicious looking words listed by two or more people, but we'll just sweep them quietly under the carpet.

Any word listed by one person only has been hunted thoroughly in my OED. My OED is a wonderful book, by the way - it's the "compact" edition, which means it's the complete thing "reproduced micrographically" in one volume, and is chuffing massive. It's the second edition, for people who care about such things. Words which weren't in the OED I checked against dictionary.com to be sure.

The (existent) words guessed by only one person:

zotz: ert. It's in the OED. Yes, it's the opposite of inert. It's also a verb meaning to irritate. Believe it or not (though it wasn't relevant to this game), erter is also a word meaning "one who erts" :)

lanfykins: reyes. Ive just checked the Boggle rules, and nowhere does it say you have to know what your word means. Lanfykins commented that Reyes, as in syndrome, was probably a proper noun, in which she's correct. However, the OED says reyes is also an obsolete word for an antiquated Portugese coin.

dr_bob: teet, teets. Yup, OED lets you have it as a(n obsolete) variant of teat.

addedentry: eyen is an acceptable plural according to the OED. Though in fairness, it says it is rare, of doubtfule meaning and "perh. some error". nebs is the plural of neb, which several people listed, meaning nose or snout (or mouth or face). Interestingly, the OED doesn't list the verb as I'd use it, ie to neb into something, meaning be nosey. reb, rebs - I thought I'd got Addedentry on this one, as the OED lists two senses - one an abbreviation and one foreign. Then I found a third, which is an obsolete variant of rib, so have to give it to him. renet is an acceptable variant of rennet.

cuthbertcross: oxy means, if you please, of or like an ox. Yes, really.Just be glad she didn't put down treey as well, because that also exists. yer exists as various forms of you/your/their. treet is an obsolete form of treat, and ernest of earnest.

j4: ernes yada, yada, obsolete, earns. perne, pernes (also spelled pirn) is a kind of bobbin. pree, prees is a Scots word meaning "to make proof or trial of". stipe means a log, post or treetrunk. tyer is an obsolete form of tear.

metame: oxeye, oxeyes is, no surprises, the eye(s) of an ox. wees is an acceptable form of the verb - lots of people put wee on their lists, but no wees.

shyrdar: pene, obsolete form of pain. Damn this obsolescent nonsense :(

pm215: weepie, a film which makes you cry.

pseudomonas: stept is as valid as stepped. ret means to soak in water, especially something like flax. More impressively, Pseudomonas knew this. penes is the correct plural of penis and Psedomonas knew this too. (See me avoid using the correct pronoun because I don't actually know if Pseudomonas is a he or a she :) yeo is a stream or a drain in mining. Pseudomonas also knew that zyxt is the last word in the dictionary - it's the "2nd singular indicative present of SEE" if you're Kentish. Which is clearly rubbish because a word like that must have been made up by a Scrabble fan.

Scores on the doors:
J4: 13
Pseudomonas: 7
Cuthbertcross: 7
Metame: 6
Addedentry: 6
Dr_Bob: 3
Pm215: 3
Lanfykins: 2
Shrydar: 1
Zotz: 1

Which shows J4 as something of a runaway winner. Remind me never to play Scrabble (or Boggle) against her :)

I've come to the conclusion that, for the purpose of word games, it's just too damn difficult to decide what is or is not a word.

For example, Pseudomonas' suggestions of beepier and seepier weren't in the dictionary. I could imagine using either of those in the unlikely event of talking about two particularly beepy or seepy things. But my rule was "in the OED". On the other hand, the word darker doesn't explicitly have its own entry either - presumably because its a comparative formed in an obvious way - and I don't know that anyone would debate the existence of that.

Similarly, a number of people went for the Scrabble approach that, if x is a verb, then doing it again must be to re-x. Words like renest weren't in the OED, but might well be in the Scrabble official word list book. An honourable mention, incidentally, to Pm215 for the only unique seven letter word: resteep. He defined it as "to put the teabag in a second time" which seems perfectly reaosonable to me. (The only other seven letter word was "weepier", which was listed by three people).

There is of course, always the debate about what constitutes a foreign word, too. English is a mongrel language at the best of times, it just depends how recently we stole the word in question.

As someone pointed out to me the other day, the best way to play this particular Boggle variant would be to list all possible 3-16 letter combinations which, for an online game, is entirely too feasible. Even if taking a less extreme view, the lesson from this game seems to be that listing slightly bad spellings of existing words will probably stand you in good stead.

See next entry for an attempt to avoid the above problems :)

Thanks all.