She wants my vocabulary, complete from A to Z

[venta]

OK, time for totting up the scores in the second Boggle game. This game was indeed much less popular than the former - and people entered much shorter word lists - making it a relatively simple matter to tot the scores up.

I originally said:

"A word is a legal word if (and only if) dictionary.com lists it as a word."

by which I meant "rules as before, but the dictionary whose word is final is dictionary.com".

However, one of the earliest entries was from addedentry, including words like "Etna". Which clearly wouldn't be allowed as it's a proper noun. However, it is listed by dictionary.com by a word, so I was left without, as they say, one of those lower limbs upon which to balance myself.

I had thought I'd expressly commented that things dictionary.com lists as "in Acronym Finder" weren't counted, but apparently I didn't, or I deleted it or something. I did stick to that, however: d.com has an entry for an acronym, but doesn't list it "as a word". Anything else, however - proper nouns, foreign words - was fair game.

In addition, considering the cock up I made up explaining my scoring system, I reckon the lesson we can all learn from this is that I can't specify games for toffee.

lanfykins: INTO, WELL, NEAL, TEW, AWM, WELE, WANE, FLYTE, LATEEN + 5 non-unique words
Total score: 12 - 5 = 7
addedentry: LEW, ETNA, FEAL, FETA, TEEL, WALM, LENTO + 4 non-unique words
Total score: 8 - 4 = 4
shyrdar: oaf, fan, let, ant, oaten + 3 non-unique words
Total score: 6 -3 = 3
nisaba: Flan, Ween, Leant, Wanty + 2 non-unique words
Total score: 6 - 2 = 4
pseudomonas: entered an empty list of words
Total score: 0
undyingking: EWE, WEN, YAT + 2 non-unique words
Total score: 3 - 2 = 1
wimble: ante, lei, leafy, fane, flay + 6 non-unique words
Total score = 6 - 6 = 0

Which leaves Lanfykins, who said "please don't list my score if it's embarrassing", as the winner on 7 points.

That means that the longest list of words (fourteen valid entries in dictionary.com) scored the highest, and the second longest list (eleven valid entries) scored the (joint) lowest. Game theorists make of that what you will :)

Comments

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Ooh, interesting, thank you! I reasoned that if there were an optimal strategy, I had to assume other players would find it. So submitting obvious words, in the hope that no one else would dare, was out, and the obscurest obscurities were in.

Also, it was worth entering words of 5 letters or more because the score from them being acceptable far exceeds the harm from them being duplicates. Unfortunately I could only find one (-:

[venta.livejournal.com]

Leeway was, I think, the longest word available.

Sadly, more than one person spotted it :)